Cured [ManxMan]

Chapter Fourteen

I should not have been doing this.

If my father found out I was spending time with Matthew Jimenez again, he would be furious. I had never seen him as angry as he was the first time he found us together. That was a month ago and he hadn't brought it up since, besides the frequent questions about who I hung out with at school (the answer was invariably "no one," which he didn't seem to believe, though it had been true for most of my life).

I wasn't lying to him. I hadn't spent any time with Matthew since we presented our project, had tried to avoid even looking in his direction. That didn't stop him from being his friendly self, smiling and waving in the hallways or stopping to say hi in psychology and chemistry, the only classes we had together, somehow unfazed by my obvious avoidance.

But also somehow avoiding my father's watchful eye. The man had taken to patrolling the hallways between classes, much to the chagrin of most of the student body, and rumors spread that the principal was trying to catch everything from dress code violations to a drug operation run entirely out of the lockers of the theater department (and I wasn't sure if the rumor was just that he was trying to catch them in the act, or that the act was occurring at all). None of them guessed he was keeping an eye on his son to make sure I didn't get too close to the gay kid and catch the faggot or whatever he thought would happen.

At least Matthew was wise enough to keep his head down and ignore me when my father was nearby. But today Dad was chaperoning the physics team's trip to a university halfway across the state for a competition, so he hadn't been here all day and wouldn't be home until late tonight. Matthew took advantage of the moment to invite me over to his house after school, and without the excuse of "my dad will know and kill me," I somehow found myself agreeing.

Which brought us here, to me stepping out of my car parked on the curb of a two-story brick house that screamed American dream, complete with a white picket fence in the backyard and a bike propped near the garage, too small to belong to Matthew now and too well cared for to be a long abandoned childhood bike.

My suspicions of a younger sibling were confirmed before we were all the way through the front door, as a little boy barreled toward us, his screams and laughs only growing in volume when Matthew responded by scooping him up and holding him upside down by the ankles.

"I feel like we've had the conversation about behaving yourself when I have friends over," he scolded the child, but he didn't sound particularly upset.

"And I know we've had the conversation about holding your brother upside down where you could drop him and break his neck," a woman's voice called from a door to our left, her scolding tone much more serious. I didn't question how she knew what he was doing when she shouldn't have been able to see from there.

Mattie didn't question it either, setting his brother back on his feet and watching the boy scurry away. "We're going upstairs," he said as we passed the doorway to the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of his mother as we passed, a woman several inches shorter than me with his brother's ash blonde hair.

She didn't look up from whatever she was stirring, but when we were halfway up the stairs, she called, "Leave the door open!"

Matthew glanced over his shoulder so I would be able to see him roll his eyes, but when we arrived on the landing and entered the first door on the right, he did leave the door cracked.

"She wants to make sure we're not up here doing anything," he said as he turned to face me, rolling his eyes again. I could feel my blood pumping harder, my face heating at the implications of his words. She thought we were... and it was so easy for him to talk about it, like it was nothing to casually mention he was gay.