Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 111089 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 555(@200wpm)___ 444(@250wpm)___ 370(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111089 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 555(@200wpm)___ 444(@250wpm)___ 370(@300wpm)
Or perhaps I was just looking forward to being behind my desk, to have that barrier between us. To protect us both from my desire.
Sitting in my swivel chair, I thumbed through some papers I had left to grade, sweating even more, to the point where I wondered if I had the goddamn heater on too high. I started to get up to check, when he walked through my office doorway, wearing the pair of pants I’d offered him, wiping the tee across his forehead.
I couldn’t help noticing he still glowed with patches of water scattered across his beautiful, smooth flesh. It was the sort of moment that made me vividly aware that, even though I hadn’t felt this kind of intense desire for a man before, I certainly did in that moment.
“I promise it wasn’t raining that hard when I was leaving the car. It was a downpour just at the end there.”
“You should probably put that shirt on,” I warned him.
“Maybe if you didn’t look at me like that, I would.”
I took a moment to enjoy the view, saliva collecting in my mouth, and he stepped right in front of my desk, a smug expression on his face as he studied me, as he seemed to know what he was doing to me. A brief standoff, before he smiled and found his way into the holes of the shirt, my eyes enjoying what I knew was going to be a short-lived preview of his V lines, navel, and happy trail before the curtain closed. For the best, I reminded myself, since obviously, restraint wasn’t something I was very good at when it came to Kyle Forsythe. And judging by that expression on his face, he damn well knew it.
As we looked into one another’s eyes, I thought about all the things that had gone unsaid. He hadn’t even mentioned the very reason I was certain he was there.
“You can take a seat, if you’d like,” I told him, motioning across the desk to the available chair.
He winced as he looked between me and the chair, as though he knew I sought to keep some physical boundary between us, but he acquiesced.
Despite his shower in the rain, I could still smell a hint of pine from his deodorant.
Slouching in the chair, he rested his hands on its arms and sighed, and we sat in silence for a while.
I could have lived in the quiet with him, the peace of us getting a moment alone with one another, in the safety of my home, which felt like it was in another realm, distant from the world we’d just come from, from the memories I knew would be brought up far too soon. He reached into his back pocket and retrieved a slip of paper.
The conversion-camp brochure that had been in the box.
Seeing it assured me of what I already knew—that he’d seen the contents of the box. That he already knew too much about my past.
“I guess I know why you don’t talk about your parents much,” he said, and my face tensed up, my chin quivering.
“Yeah…” I took the brochure, and as I opened it, a picture of my brother in high school slid out.
“You guys were close?”
“I thought we were close enough that he would have told me what this summer camp was really about. Seems I had a lot of assumptions about my family, and I didn’t really figure things out until after he passed, when I discovered how cruel parents could be to their own children. Mine didn’t even mention the camp after he killed himself. I found out when I was going through his belongings. And then to find out that he’d confided in them, trusted them, only for them to make him promise to keep it from the one member of our family who would have been there for him, who could have protected him from that fate… I just…”
A tear escaped my eye, one that surprised me how quickly it had fallen, yet it was amazing how just a conversation could transport me back in time, into each fucked-up memory.
“To think they were trying to ‘protect’ me from the truth when we should have been protecting him.”
“James, you didn’t know.”
“But why didn’t I know?”
“He didn’t tell you.”
Kyle was only trying to help, but it couldn’t change the truth.
“He shouldn’t have needed to tell me. He was my brother. There were so many times when I could tell he was struggling, going through something, I just didn’t know what. I would ask, and he would say that work or school was hard. I was never really very interested in guys or girls, so I didn’t think much like everyone else. It wasn’t even on my radar, but I wish I’d mentioned that if he was gay, or bi, or anything, I would have loved him just the same. I thought we had the kind of relationship where he felt he could come to me and— Jesus. Fuck me.”