Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 82250 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82250 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
I’m scared. Scared as fuck of being hurt. Being rejected.
But I’ve been rejected before and survived. I survived with Peter, and I survived tonight with Mom. If I’ve learned anything since I met Travis, it’s that avoiding pain has never kept me from feeling it. It just makes it last so much longer. I can’t keep torturing myself about what might happen. Can’t let the frightening what ifs control my life.
36
Travis
I sit in my car in front of my childhood home. The last time I was here is when I left flowers for my mom’s birthday—flowers she never once mentioned to me.
She doesn’t seem to feel my loss the way I’ve tried to tell myself I don’t feel theirs. It’s a lie. I feel it. It weighs me down every fucking day of my life.
But Gary helped. He filled those empty spaces inside me, which is why I’m here.
I sigh, then push open the door before I do the easy thing and walk away, the same way I walked away from Gary. The same way my parents walked away from me.
The easy way doesn’t cut it anymore.
I make my way down the cement walkway, surrounded by their pristine lawn.
When I make it to the porch, I raise my hand and knock, trying to ignore the tight fist around my windpipe.
It’s only a moment later that the door pulls open, a frown creasing Mom’s lips. “Travis…what are you doing here?”
“Why do I need a reason to be here? Regardless of how you feel about me, I’m still your son, aren’t I?” Say yes…I need you to say yes…
“Of course you are. And please, don’t put this off on me. We’re in this situation because of choices you’ve made, not me. You’re determined to shove your lifestyle in our face, which you proved at Martin’s engagement.”
My heart slams against my chest the same way my feet slammed against the treadmill daily since my fight with Gary. How can they not want me to be happy? How can they want me to hide?
“Who’s at the door?” my dad asks.
“It’s me. Your son,” I say as I walk past Mom and into the house. I head straight for the study because I know that’s where he is. Mom’s heels tap against the tile floor behind me. “What about you? Am I still your son, too? You made a commitment to me when I was a baby. You’ve been the only father I’ve ever known. Why did you do that if you could so easily turn your back on me?”
He sits behind his dark, mahogany desk, a soft lamp lit on the corner of it.
“Don’t be dramatic, Travis. You don’t have to stop loving someone to disagree with them. We disagree with your lifestyle. You know that.”
Every instinct inside of me is telling me to lash out, to walk away. Fuck them, because I don’t need them, but…I do need Gary, if he’ll take me back. And I can’t have him if I don’t do this.
Without being invited to, I walk over and sit on the leather couch across from him. Mom watches us, her eyes shooting back and forth between Dad and me.
“I used to want to be like you,” I admit to him. “The kind of man who would take in a son who wasn’t his. Who wanted his children to succeed. Who loved his wife with every piece of him…and then I realized that for me, it wouldn’t be a wife, and my whole world came crashing down. Do you know what it feels like to grow up with two brothers who have the same father, while you feel like the outcast? It wasn’t Martin and Malcolm’s fault. I know they love me, but in here.” I tap my temple. “And in here.” Then my chest. “I just felt different. I knew being gay made me even more different, and I did everything I could to stifle that so I didn’t stand out even more in this family.”
“I never treated you any differently,” he says, and there’s a part of me that knows that’s true.
“That doesn’t change how I felt. It doesn’t change the fact that I spent years trying to be someone I wasn’t. Do you know what that does to a person?” I look at Mom. “It was eating away at me until I couldn’t deny it anymore and then…then I didn’t want to. What was so wrong with who I was? What was so wrong with what I did? You both answered that question for me when you found me with that guy in college. Everything that I knew would happen did. You couldn’t accept me, and I think…because of that, I think there was a part of me that couldn’t accept myself.”
Mom gasps, which surprises me. My leg is bouncing up and down, and I drum my thumbs on my knees.