by Laura Stone
© Laura Stone, 2014
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 13: 978-1-941530-24-5
Published by Interlude Press
http://interludepress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Book design by Lex Huffman
Cover Design by Buckeyegrrl Designs
Cover & Interior Artist/Illustrator: C.B. Messer
To Guy Garvey
for the irresistible inspiration.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
It wasn’t a good morning for Oliver Andrews. In fact, it was a stressful, forgot to buy coffee, hit the snooze alarm too many times, tripped over a pile of textbooks and painfully fell to his knee sort of morning: a typical Tuesday for an overworked graduate student in a country not his own.
Oliver was struggling to get all of his things together to make it to a lecture on time; he sidestepped his flat-mate, Janos, who was also racing to get out the door. He didn’t have to look up to know that Janos was still irritated with him. He’d only tried to reach out to the guy by speaking to him in Hungarian, and no, Oliver wasn’t great at it, probably butchered the pronunciation, but surely he should have gotten some brownie points for trying. Oliver was positive that he’d used the right accents. Mostly positive. Well… pretty sure. He’d already had a few beers when he’d gone up to Janos and his soccer team to offer congratulations on their win that afternoon.
Then again, it wasn’t as bad as when Oliver had first met the guy and wanted to give him a proper Hungarian greeting, a sort of verbal olive branch since they were both international students; that hadn’t gone over well at all. Oliver knew he was using a formal greeting, but didn’t realize that it was one only used for an elderly person; for an elderly woman, in particular. Janos had promptly informed him of his mistake. Then Janos had learned that Oliver was gay and spent the first two weeks avoiding any eye contact. Because sure, that’s how Oliver liked hitting on guys: by politely referring to them as elderly Hungarian women.
It had been awkward living together the last several months and, from the look of things, it would continue to be. Janos grabbed his coat off the rack by their front door, knocking Oliver’s navy wool peacoat to the ground and not bothering to pick it up, Oliver noted. Janos muttered as he raced out the front door. The cold wind whipped the research papers that Oliver had been trying to straighten into a jumble all over the floor.
“Son of a…” Oliver sighed and gave it up as a bad job for the time being. He was too overwhelmed by the sheer number of things going wrong, and he had a no-caffeine headache slowly building.
He was just having a bad morning, full stop.
He clicked on his email on his laptop and made sure there were no changes in the day’s schedule before heading out the door. Finally, something positive: a new email from “Schreiber, Gustav”—an old friend from prep school with whom he’d not been able to connect in a couple of months. Gus was back stateside, busy with his final year of study for his law degree and about to sit for the bar exam. Slaving away to get his graduate degree in social psychology in the United Kingdom hadn’t exactly left Oliver with a ton of time to stay in touch; drifting apart happened, unfortunately. So much of his former life seemed to have slipped out of his hands, and he knew that was on his shoulders. He had put his head down and plowed through his undergraduate degree and then dove headfirst into a master’s at Cambridge only to look up and realize that while he was focused on his career, he’d let people who had been important to him fall by the wayside.
Great. Another thing to feel bad about. He made a mental note to sit down tonight and send a long email to Gus, catching him up on everything happening in England. Oliver clicked the link and saw that Gus had emailed him an embedded video with a note: “Hope this makes your day better.”
Oliver could definitely use a feel-good something. He was steadily getting his ass kicked by his master’s, even though it was everything he had hoped he would be doing at this stage in his academic career. He believed he had a lot to prove as an American student and, as a result, he was constantly behind on sleep from trying to stay on top of his reading and research.
Probably a dog dancing or something; he loves those.
He put the day’s lecture and scheduled conformity experiment out of his mind by clicking play and then pause to allow the buffer to catch up. The Internet hated their building, the sort of cold stone affair common in town. At first it had been amazing to be living in a bit of history. Then the wet cold of autumn set in, and Oliver missed good ol’ American sheetrock and insulation.
While he gave the video a moment to load, he tapped the stack of papers on its edge to straighten it, muttering his day’s schedule to himself under his breath until he got everything just right. Then he clicked play, and the screen filled with an American morning show. Oliver rolled his eyes at the overly-peppy hosts and moved to grab his satchel to get the research papers safely stored, figuring that he’d listen to whatever whistling dog or stupid human trick was about to come on as he packed up to leave.
And that’s when he heard it: a beautiful voice that was painfully familiar. God, that sounds just like… He dropped the satchel—the papers, thankfully, stowed away—and turned to his computer screen. It seemed as though time had stopped, that it took forever to see proof on the screen that he’d heard what he thought he had heard. And then he saw him.
Oliver immediately forgot that he needed to get to campus, that he had a mountain of work ahead of him, that he’d not even eaten yet. Seth. Seth, his first love, his first, well, everything, was on his computer screen, singing. And if he’d thought Seth had a beautiful voice as a teenager, it was nothing to how he sounded now. Clearly, his time at Juilliard and whatever he’d done after had developed his voice into something truly special, almost otherworldly.
Oliver gripped the computer with both hands, his face close to the screen, his breath trapped in his aching lungs. Seth, tall and lean, his pretty, still-boyish face aglow from the joy of performing, was in the middle of the studio, hands clasped in front of him, eyes closed and head tilted slightly as he sang a song Oliver wasn’t familiar with. Oliver was transfixed by the lines of Seth’s long throat, by the way the fitted shirt he wore accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, by the small smile on his face as he sang. It was Seth, but now so much more than the captivating boy he had loved all those years ago.
Memories came rushing back to Oliver, tumbling over each other as if trying to assert their dominance: Seth in his Bakerfield Prep uniform, sitting across from Oliver in their French class, smiling shyly. Seth’s Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed nervously before pushing open Oliver’s bedroom door after they decided to take their relationship to the next level. Seth’s head thrown back, laughing at something his dad said at dinner, eyes sparkling with war
mth as he turned to look at Oliver. A warm, sunny Saturday just after Oliver had graduated from Bakerfield when Seth, home from his first year at university in New York City, had managed to spend the night when Oliver’s parents were gone for the weekend.
That was it. That was the day that would forever be branded in Oliver’s memory: his hand running through Seth’s thick, light brown hair. Seth, eyes closed and still sleepy, turning his head to press a kiss to the inside of Oliver’s wrist. Seth falling back asleep and Oliver’s arm going numb, him knowing nothing on earth would make him move and wake Seth. Because Oliver had known even then how precious and fleeting these moments were, even if the two of them didn’t want to admit that things were changing, that life was moving too fast for them to keep up, that they were still kids and had no idea how hard life would get when they were finally on their own. He’d had that entire Saturday with the person he loved in his arms, unable to accept that it might be the last time he would get the opportunity.
Oliver swallowed around the lump that had risen in his throat at the first sound of the voice that belonged to the only person he’d ever really loved. He clicked on the pause button and tried to catch his breath. Seth was frozen in mid-action on his screen, turned to the left as if acknowledging the hosts of the show. Why was he on The Today Show? Why did Gus send him this? He scrolled back up to read the message of the email.
Hope this makes your day better.
Oliver attempted a laugh; a strangled, sad sound came out. He noticed the clock in the lower right-hand corner of his computer screen. “Shit,” he muttered, flipping the screen closed and jamming the laptop roughly in his satchel. He would deal with this later, whatever that meant. For now, he had about three minutes to get fifteen minutes away. He stepped out onto the slick stones that made up the walkway to his flat and pulled the heavy wooden door shut. The icy cold wind cut through every layer he had on, and he tried to stop thinking of how beautiful Seth’s bare skin had been with the midday sun shining on him at two in the afternoon on that warm and lazy Saturday, him spread out on Oliver’s bed, smiling as if he weren’t about to shatter Oliver’s heart into a million pieces just a few hours later.
* * *
“… Determinants and consequences of adaptive and maladaptive parental behavior are the data needed in order to progress when confronted…”
Oliver saw a few dirty looks directed at him as he slipped into a chair in the back of the lecture hall. Well, yet another black mark for American students, I guess. One of his heroes in the field he was studying was giving today’s lecture; he’d looked forward to it for weeks. And yet he could barely focus on Dr. Lan’s real-world experiences in forensics psychology while his mind continued to bombard him with vivid memories, things he hadn’t allowed himself to think about for years.
The look of pleasant surprise on Seth’s face as Oliver moved in to kiss him for the first time. The triumphant happiness on Seth’s face the first time Oliver held his hand in public. The devastation Oliver read in Seth’s eyes when his father—his only living parent—was hospitalized after a motorcycle accident. How important it made Oliver feel when Seth came to him for comfort that day; how Seth held onto him, needing him and no one else. The first time they had sex, how trusting and happy they were. The elegance of Seth’s long fingers. How their hands looked when they laced them together.
Oliver was getting angry with himself. He dealt with this years ago. Hell, before he moved to England he’d packed up all of his extraneous things for his parents to add to all of his trophies and report cards and whatever else they couldn’t quite bring themselves to throw away. It had been a relief to add the mementos of his relationship with Seth to the other stored memories trapped in their expansive attic, to put those things out of his mind and thousands of miles away instead of letting them crowd space in the back of his closet and in his broken heart, choking him every time he came across them.
In those boxes was his framed picture from Seth’s senior prom; they were the first male couple to attend in their school’s history. God, he’d been so amazed by Seth that night; how proud he’d been of both of them for going. There was a small bundle of handwritten letters from Seth’s first semester at university, tied together with a bit of blue satin ribbon. It hurt just knowing they existed (and the letters he’d written in turn, filled with his own longing and dreams for their future), knowing that those feelings so earnestly expressed by the boy he’d loved had changed. Also jammed in a box, as a last-minute thought, was a heather-green Larsen Custom Cycles & Repair T-shirt from Seth’s father’s shop that Oliver had foolishly worn to bed every night that first semester when Seth was studying in New York.
He pushed it all aside, frustrated that a song he didn’t even know was capable of setting off all of these reactions in him, forcing him to remember things he had worked very hard to forget. He didn’t want to think about the person singing the song. He wanted to focus on his studies. Well, he would just make himself focus. This was important, not ghosts from the past. He’d pushed them away before and he could do it again.
He set his jaw, and listened to Dr. Lan describe a session with a twelve-year-old who had almost committed suicide as a result of bullying by his peers. The session turned out to be very productive and had led to change in the boy’s school in Manchester, fortunately, and Oliver scrambled to take notes on the various processes and tactics used with the school administration and the local government, knowing they would come in handy one day.
As Oliver walked to the research center after the lecture ended, he gave his brain permission to mock itself. The first paper of Dr. Lan’s he’d read was during his senior year at Bakerfield. The psychologist had worked with an Irish high school boy—delicate features, a dancer, and out—who suffered horrible abuse from both his classmates and working-class father. The case had sparked a renewed interest in the “It Gets Better” campaign circling the Western world at the time, one Oliver used in his own student council campaign. Oliver had told himself that he was interested in it for the obvious reasons: He was gay and he knew how difficult it was to be out as a gay person in a conservative place. He ignored the fact that the boy bore a striking resemblance to his boyfriend who had just moved away—consciously, at least.
When he’d gone to visit Brandeis’ campus that same year, excited by the close proximity of a cultured city like Boston and for all the potential the school year held, he saw a flyer on a bulletin board announcing that Cambridge University’s Dr. Lan would be a guest speaker at the Heller School for Social Policy on sexual harassment of LGBT people. This dovetailed so perfectly with everything he’d experienced as a kid before attending a private high school that he gladly skipped an audition for the music department and sat in on the lecture, eyes wide and mind soaking up all of the ideas being presented.
His conservative father, a founding partner in a corporate law firm, was very happy with Oliver’s decision to switch majors from musical theory to social justice and social policy. “It’ll give you more options,” his father said over the phone that night. “You can sing for others and go hungry, or you can have a career that feeds you and sing for yourself.”
Oliver told himself that he simply wanted to have a hand in making the world a better place. It had been his mantra since coming out to his friends his freshman year in high school. He had so desperately needed someone to be there for him when he was struggling with his own identity that he’d make a point to be there for people when they were struggling. Like how he’d been there for Se—
He laughed bitterly at himself. His entire academic career was based on a person he thought he’d never see again. It’s taken five years and two countries to finally figure this out?
But that was unfair—he’d always known why he began to pull away from music and sports to broaden his extracurricular activities as his senior year of high school played out. It was just that once he and Seth severed ties, he took great pains to convince himself that Seth had simply been a
catalyst for him to finally make a choice, and that the desire to focus his life on specific things must have been buried deep within his psyche all along.
What a load of garbage. It had always been about Seth.
* * *
FALL, FIVE YEARS AGO
“You have to be kidding, Oliver.” Disbelief dripped from Seth’s every syllable. “Babe, you’re in Kansas. I love that you’re trying, I do, but you put your heart on your sleeve.” Seth’s voice changed to one of sweet sincerity. “I love that about you, but it’s going to backfire. People there don’t care about hate crimes. Hell, they don’t even see bullying as a hate crime! It’s that whole ‘boys will be boys’ bullshit. This isn’t a good idea.”
Oliver was glad he’d called instead of Skyping his boyfriend to tell him about the student petition he was starting; he was pretty sure his face would show how crestfallen he was. He cleared his throat. “I thought you would be happy about it. Proud, even. I know I’ll get enough signatures here, and once other high schools see what I’m trying to do—”
“Oh, Oliver,” Seth sighed. Oliver could imagine him rubbing his hand over his eyes in frustration. Seth tried again, his voice soft. “You and I both know how backward people can be. We had to fight to even go to prom last year, remember? High school students don’t care about bullying; it’s practically a school-sanctioned sport. I think it’s okay to accept that the Midwest is jam-packed with the blissfully ignorant.”
“Well, I disagree. I think they’ve just been too afraid to stand up to the status quo.” Oliver couldn’t understand why Seth wasn’t being totally supportive. Seth had been bullied out of his high school until his father had sued the administration, landing Seth in private school, tuition paid, as a settlement. It was how Oliver and Seth had met.
“Babe, I think you’re setting yourself up for disaster, and I just don’t want you to be hurt. I can’t see how this can end in anything but disappointment for you, and I don’t want that to happen. But you know that I’ll be here when you need soothing after this all stalls out. Trust me, I know how this story ends: with you hanging from a flagpole in your underwear. But I have to tell you about a class today where…”