24 Years (MxM)

Chapter 2

Silence. I look at my phone. "Call Ended." The motherfucker hung up on me. I swiftly get up out of bed and chuck my phone as hard as I can at the wall and scream at the top of my lungs as I attempt to expel all of the anguish I feel at this moment. I fall to my knees and utterly break down.

I knew something hasn't been right between us for a while now. We fought a lot more and spent a lot more time apart doing our own thing. But I trusted him. I figured it was a phase. We'd get through it. We still hung out and played video games. We still had sex. What went wrong?

After 15 minutes of the hardest crying of my life, I collect my phone to see the damage. There is a dent in the wall, but I'm rather surprised the phone is undamaged. I call Marla and tell her briefly what happened, and she tells me that she'll be over in a minute.

I crawl back into bed and pull the covers over myself and cry underneath them in the dark. After a bit, I hear someone come through the front door. It could only be Marla.

She comes into the room and I sit up in my bed as she sits down. I move quickly to give her a huge hug and the crying starts anew.

"Aw, baby," she says in her gentle voice. She holds me tight and starts rubbing my back and I shed tear after tear into her bosom.

After a few minutes, in between my sobs, I squeak out the words, "He called me a kid!" Then I start to cry all the more.

"I know, I know," she says as she continues trying to sooth me.

I cry for a bit longer and someone else enters the room. "I finally found a spot behind the building in the alley," Josie says. She's Marla's longtime girlfriend. They've been together almost as long as Matt and me. At this thought, I weep more.

Josie sits on the bed while Marla still holds me and rubs me. "Baby, you're gonna be okay. We're here."

I couldn't even express how thankful I was that they were.

-----

I cried a lot the first few days. I exchanged text messages with Matt, telling him that I packed up all of the crap in my apartment that belonged to him and put it in boxes and left it in the hallway. I took every damn picture I had of him and put it in a box. I also took off the gold ring he bought me two years ago. He had presented it to me as he promised that when we finished college, we'd come out to my parents and then get married. I threw that damn ring into one of those boxes. I was so mad.

Speaking of my mother, she was so worried about me.

"Are you sick?" she would ask.

"No, mom," I said.

"Are you on drugs?"

"Mom..."

"Are you in trouble with the law?"

"Mom!"

"It's a woman, isn't it?"

"It's none of that mom. I'm just stressed out from school exams. I'll be okay."

"Fine, fine. This weekend we were thinking of having a barbecue. Bring Matt-chan. We haven't seen you two for a while."

My heart breaks anew. How do I explain this to mom? I inadvertently sniffle as tears flood my eyes.

"Honey? What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm catching a cold." I sniffle some more. "I love you, mom. I gotta go."

"Okay but get some rest and call me later."