Rough

by Hayden Hunt

  And each week that went by, I got angrier. More and more furious until I couldn’t take it anymore. I got home one night and thought I was going to explode.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I had no idea what was going to make these feelings finally go away. Maybe nothing would…

  Or maybe I just needed to go to Jesse and get closure. Maybe, after all these years of silence, I finally needed to tell him how I felt. How angry I was. How hurt what he’d done had been. How much he had affected me.

  Maybe that wasn’t the most mature thing to do. It would be better to stay silent and uninvolved, not sure into his life just to tell him how furious I was.

  But I wasn’t feeling very mature. Quite the opposite, actually. After weeks of getting more and more irritated with thoughts of him, I felt very vindictive.

  And I was going to go tell him. Right this very second. I shouldn’t have to live with my pain any longer. I should get to talk about it. He should know. I was going to drive to his parents’ house.

  But, wait, I hated his parents. I didn’t want to see or deal with them.

  Okay, so I’d wait outside. Until he came in or out of the house. Was it creepy? Sure, but I didn’t care. He’d gone to my damn aunt’s house. I could go to his.

  I grabbed my keys with my heart pounding in my chest. This moment was going to change my life. It was going to set me free from all this pain.

  And it had… but not in the way I’d expected.

  9

  Jesse

  I had really underestimated how miserable it was going to feel to be back in town, and I had already initially thought it’d be pretty miserable.

  But after seeing Aaron, things had become so much worse.

  These past few weeks had been hell for me. Every day, I’d been filled with guilt and thoughts of Aaron. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. And I wanted nothing more than to go back to his house and beg for forgiveness.

  But every time I got the urge to see him, I controlled myself. I told myself that I wasn’t going to be this person any more, the one who always thought of himself first. I was going to think about his feelings for once. I was going to do everything in my power to do what he wanted and not what I wanted.

  But it was easier said than done.

  I tried to think of it as personal growth. I was growing, becoming a better person, someone I could be proud of. It was a good thing. This was good for me.

  But being away from Aaron really didn’t feel good for me.

  My parents were as annoying as usual, so I did my best to stay out of the house. Every day, I went to look for jobs. I brought my resume, filled out applications with every minimum wage job in town, and I’d even had two interviews. But nothing had stuck.

  It was disappointing, considering it had almost been a month since I’d been home, and I had nothing to show for it and was no closer to leaving than I had been when I’d gotten here. And I really needed to be closer to leaving because my parents were making me crazy.

  Not to mention the fact that I had no social life. At least before I’d moved back, I’d been with my girlfriend. I’d had her to see every day. It may not have been the most passionate relationship but it still beat being alone.

  I never stopped thinking about Aaron completely, but, as the days dragged on, he consumed my mind less and less. One day, I’d be able to not think about him, I was sure of it. Even if that was months from now. And even though I’d always regret what I’d done to him, at least I could find some solace in the fact that I was sacrificing my happiness for him now. He didn’t have to see me, and that was all he wanted.

  Or, at least, that was what I’d thought he wanted. Until the day I’d come home from filling out job applications and seen a familiar face standing in my driveway.

  “Aaron?” I asked, as I walked up to him, both elated and confused by his presence.

  For a second, before he glanced back at me, I thought maybe this was a good thing. But, as soon as I saw his expression, I realized it wasn’t. He looked just as angry as the day I’d come to his aunt’s house… maybe even more so.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, when he didn’t respond to me.

  “I’m here to… I’m here to finally tell you something I’ve wanted to say a long time,” he said.

  I looked up over at the entrance of my house, not sure if my parents had noticed that he was here. But if they had, I wanted to get away and avoid having my mom potentially lurking over our conversation. She was nosy; that was the kind of thing she would do. I wouldn’t even put it past her to creak the door open a little so she could hear our conversation.

  “Okay…” I said. “Well, can we at least, walk to the corner maybe?” I asked. He knew the reason why, we’d used to sit on the corner of my block very often to escape my parents. There’d been a bus stop with a bench, so it’d never looked weird for us to talk over there.

  He didn’t look happy about it, but he agreed. “Fine,” he said, “let’s go.”

  We made our way to the corner, but he didn’t say a word as we walked over, making me more and more nervous with every step. Once we got to the bus stop, I leaned against the pole and looked at him while crunching some fallen leaves with my foot. “Okay, so…” I pushed him to talk.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?!” he snapped suddenly.

  My eyes widened. “What do you—”

  “Who do you think you are that you can just come into my life again like this? After everything you did?! After how badly you hurt me?” I’d never seen him so emotional.

  “I’m… I’m sorry, Aaron. When I saw you at the hospital, I just… I wanted to apologize, I wanted to make things better somehow. I realize now how stupid that was, but I can’t exactly take it back. And when you made it clear there was nothing I could do to make things better between us. I left. I disappeared, just like you wanted.”

  “Yeah, because that’s the thing you’re good at, right?!” he yelled. I found myself especially grateful we had walked over here, because if my parents hadn’t initially realized he’d been hanging out outside, they’d have known now by the yelling.

  “I… I don’t have any excuses,” I told him. I really didn’t.

  “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?” he asked. “I never wanted you to disappear, Jesse. I wanted you to make things better. For years, I wanted you to make things better. But you never fucking apologized. You never came back. You never tried to talk to me again. After everything we’d been through, how could I mean so little to you?” His eyes filled up with tears.

  “But you don’t!” I said quickly. “You mean so fucking much to me! And you always have. You meaning little to me has never been an issue.”

  “Then what was?” he asked. “What was the issue, because I never would have treated you like that. I never would have stood by and watched your life fall apart, never reaching out to help.”

  I sighed. “I know that. I know because you’re stronger than me. You are… you’re brave, Aaron. You always have been. And you never cared what people thought of you. You made your own way in the world, and I have always, always been jealous of that. And when we were young, I was just… so damn weak. That’s all it was. It was weakness. I was scared.”

  “Scared of what?” he asked, his voice becoming a little less angry.

  “Scared of everything I felt for you. Scared of how wrong it was to have the feelings I had for you. Afraid of what people would think about me if they found out… even more afraid of what my parents would think of me. So, when Caleb heard about the kiss, I just… I panicked. I thought about what it would be like if it got out that I was gay, and I panicked.”

  He paused. “So… you did have feelings for me?” he asked.

  “Of course!” I said quickly. “You had to have known that! With the way I kissed you back… you must have known.”

  He shrugged. “I knew you were caught up in the kiss. I knew you were at least involved with that, but I didn’t really think
that you had feelings outside of that. I thought that, for you, it was just a moment. And the fact that it was just a moment was what made it easy for you to cast me aside, to throw me away like I meant nothing…”

  “No!” I said quickly, instinctively reaching out my hand to grab his. “Look, Aaron, what I did was beyond cruel, and I was a coward, but you never meant nothing. I thought of you every damn day after that kiss, the same way I thought of you every day before. You were everything to me. Even years later, you were always everything to me. I tried to live my life. I tried to move on, to date girls, to have the traditional relationship I thought the world wouldn’t judge me for. But it never worked out. Nobody has ever brought out the intimacy in me that you did. With you… it was always different.”

  He looked down, still seeming unsure, but at least allowing me to hold onto his hand. “And what do you think now?” he asked. “How afraid are you now of what the world is going to think of you?”

  “I’m still terrified,” I admitted. “Honestly? I’m probably just as terrified as I always was. But the difference now is that I know what life without you is like. Back in high school, I told myself I’d have feelings for other people. That I’d be able to find a girl who I loved as much as I loved you. But now that I’ve been out in the world and experienced it, I know that’s not true. I know there is no girl or boy who I could ever have feelings for like I have feelings for you. I knew the second I saw you again that you are the only one with whom I’m ever going to be in love. For the rest of my life, it’s only you. And I can’t imagine living the rest of my life devoid of true love, which is what I fear is going to happen if I can’t have you.”

  His jaw had dropped now, like he hadn’t expecting to hear any of this. Clearly, when he’d planned to come over here, this had not been how he’d thought things would go.

  His hand was still in mine, and I squeezed it as tightly as I could. “Say something,” I pushed him. “I know this sounds crazy. I know I sound like an insane person, and you’ve probably moved on. Hell, maybe you even have someone else in your life you love. And if you tell me to get the fuck out of your life, I’ll do it. I’ll do it because, for once, I want to not be a selfish coward. For once, I want to do whatever is going to make you happy. But, first, you have to tell me exactly what that is. I need to know what you’re thinking.”

  He shook his head and finally pulled his hand back. “No… no, there is nobody else. I’ve never loved anyone else, either. For years, you’ve been the only one in my mind and heart, but… but you still hurt me. You hurt me so damn badly, and the idea of opening myself back up to you….”

  “Right.” I nodded disappointedly, though part of me was a little happy to hear he wasn’t in love with anyone else. “I get that. I really fucked up, I know that, and if you can’t allow me back into your life, I’ll go. I’ll disappear forever.”

  He slumped down on the bus stop bench. “I just… I don’t know. I don’t want to be hurt again, I really don’t, but at the same time… I’ve never loved anyone else. I’ve never felt anything for anyone else. What if you’re my soul mate? What if the way for both of us to find real happiness is to find it with one another? I don’t want to push you away if you’re my one shot at real love, but I also don’t want to feel my soul crushed again.”

  Just hearing him say that hurt so badly. I’d always felt guilty about what I had done to him, but seeing how badly he was hurt in the flesh was tearing me up. How could I have done this to the man I loved? How had I ever allowed fear to get in the way of how I felt about him?

  “I promise, I will never hurt you again,” I told him. “I know you might not be able to believe it, but I will do absolutely anything to keep your heart safe. I will spend the rest of my life trying to make this up to you.”

  He looked over at me skeptically. “Really? Because all the social pressure that you feared before, it hasn’t all gone away. What about your parents?” he asked.

  “What about them?” I asked back.

  “They’re still going to judge you. They still won’t be happy if you decide to be with me. I’m a man, and they’re so religious. What will you do when they decide they can't stand to see you with me?”

  “Screw them,” I said definitively.

  “You really think it’ll be that easy?” he asked. “With how deeply you care about what people think about you?”

  “I won’t pretend I don’t care what people think,” I answered. “I still do. But you know what I care about so much more? The loneliness that I felt without you in my life. The loneliness I continue to feel every day without you. That’s what matters to me now. I want to be happy… finally. I want to move forward with my life, and I don’t see how I’m going to do that without you in it.”

  “You mean that?” he said, a hopeful smile forming on his lips.

  “More than I’ve meant anything in my entire life.”

  And, without skipping a beat, I leaned in for the kiss that I’d been waiting on for years.

  It was just as amazing as it had been when we were eighteen.

  10

  Aaron

  When his lips touched mine again, my world lit up. I was brought back to the day we’d shared our very first kiss, and I was just as filled with warmth and joy now as I had been then.

  It had been a long time coming. I’d never thought I would share a moment like this with him ever again. I’d never thought I’d get to feel this joy again with anyone. And though it may be stupid or naïve, I allowed myself to get absorbed in every second of it.

  When he pulled away, I was grinning ear to ear, and so was he.

  “Am I dreaming?” I asked him. “Is this real?”

  “I think so,” he said, leaning his head into my neck. “Feels real.”

  I grabbed his face with both of my hands, softly but with enough force that it brought his head up and forced him to look into my eyes.

  “Do not hurt me again, okay, Jess? I won’t forgive it again. It’s gotta be real this time. This time, it’s got to mean something.”

  He looked at me seriously. “I promise. I swear to God, I am never going to let you go again.”

  And when he said that, I felt it. I felt it deep in my bones. He meant it this time. This time, it was real.

  “Come home with me,” I blurted out.

  His eyes widened. “What?”

  “We can’t go into your house, and I can’t walk away from you right now. I can’t just… I’m sharing this beautiful moment with you, and if you are, too, if it’s real…”

  “It is real!” he defended quickly.

  “Then I want you,” I blurted again, a blush rushing through my cheeks.

  “What?” he asked, even though he definitely knew what I meant.

  “I have loved you as long as I’ve known you, and I’ve fantasized about you equally as long. If we’re finally doing this, then I just… I want you. I’m overwhelmed with all these feelings, and I want you right now.”

  His face was still serious but he said, “Okay.”

  “Okay… you’ll come back to my house, and…”

  “Yes,” he said with a serious nod. “Yes, let’s go.”

  The smile was gone from his face as it was from mine, and in their places were serious expressions. But it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t negative, it was just… intense. There was this undeniable, crazy sexual tension between us. I was nervous, and I was sure he was, too…

  But I wanted this so damn badly.

  I led him to my car and, thankfully, my place was only a few minutes away. I didn’t think I was capable of sitting with this kind of sexual tension with a long drive.

  When I parked, I got out quickly and rushed over to his side of the car, where he was barely starting to open the door. I rushed over to finish opening it for him and then took his hand in mine. He allowed me to and then followed me into the house, his hand in mine, but we still didn’t speak.

  Once inside, we both looked at each other for a moment. Just
a moment, though, because within seconds we were leaning in to kiss each other again.

  But this was a whole new kind of kiss. It wasn’t the kind of slow, romantic kiss we’d shared before. No, it was hot. His lips were pressed against mine with force. His lips sucked at me quick, and I could feel his tongue rolling around me. It was like all the sexual tension from the car ride had been refocused on my lips…

  But I wanted them refocused elsewhere.

  I started moving toward the couch and when he stumbled close enough, I promptly pushed him on to it. As soon as our lips had parted, he began to tear off his clothes. There was no prompting; it came as quickly as the kiss had come. We didn’t need to talk about what we wanted… we both already knew.

  I had seen his naked body multiple times before in high school, when we would change in the locker room at school or at his house. But now that he was an adult… wow.

  I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. He was so much more attractive than I’d remembered.

  And I had to have him.

  I started taking my own clothes off and was pleased when his eyes bulged slightly at seeing me. I mean, I knew I looked damn good naked, but it was still good to see that he knew it, too. And it gave me the confidence to do what I wanted to do next.

  I got fully undressed before him, since I was standing and he was lying on the couch, taking his outfit off. So, I was completely naked when he still had his boxers left.

  I took it upon myself to remove them.

  This was my first sexual encounter, since I’d never had any interest in women and had never met another man for whom I’d had feelings like Jesse. So, I’d thought I’d be nervous or anxious or something, unsure of what to do…

  But I’d watched a lot of porn, read a lot of erotica, fantasized a ton. And seeing him right now, there were no nerves. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. There was only eagerness in my heart.