Utterly Forgettable | MM Romance | Complete

Three: Do You Keep A Score? (2/2)

He sat on the edge of the tub, fully facing Emery in his plastic stool. "How about me paying it forward? Repaying a debt to someone I'll never be able to repay directly?"

"If this is about the money Emma left you, she wanted you to—"

"Not everything is about Emma. If things had been different, I could have been you."

That got Emery's attention. "You? How?"

Josh didn't want to tell him, no, but he had to in order to mislead Emery. That was a conscious decision. Better give him some of his past as the full reason and leave out the part where it was Emery he couldn't bear to think of as homeless and alone. "I came out when I was 15. Just went home on a Friday night, sat at dinner, and thought it was time to tell my parents I liked boys better than girls. I guess it was naive of me, but I thought it'd be alright. It's not as if my parents were zealots or particularly conservative, and they'd always been good parents, until that day — I thought it'd be alright," he repeated, as if it somehow needed to be said twice to be understood.

"My mother started crying, spewing some rhetoric about selfish boys who didn't know what they wanted and broke their mothers' hearts. How she wanted grandchildren and I was going to die with 'that gay disease'. My dad just put his arm around her, looked at me, and told me to go to my room. To sleep on it, and if I told them at breakfast I was just acting out then all would be forgiven. And if I didn't I could grab my things and go because I wouldn't be their son anymore."

It was only when Josh heard Emery's sharp inhale without really seeing it that he realized he was staring through Emery, lost in memory. This wasn't one he was in the habit of revisiting, but it still held weight, after all these years.

"I went to bed and told myself things would be different in the morning. Still packed a backpack with some clothes and what money I had from odd jobs I'd done during the summer — I've always been good with my hands, and I'd been helping one of the neighbors with her fence, restoring parts of it, painting, that sort of thing. It was pocket change, nothing that would get me a room for more than a couple of nights, but I didn't really know what else to do, so I just held on to the hope that I wouldn't have to find out how to go from there."

Emery made a motion with his still shaky hand, as if he were reaching out. Before Josh could take it in his own and clasp it, the comforting touch spreading in both directions, Emery dropped it once more. Whether Emery had decided against it or Josh had imagined what it meant, he didn't know, but the absence of that near promise was a physical ache. Josh breathed slowly, in through his nose, out through his mouth, eyes trapped in Emery's.

"Morning came and nothing changed. I won't lie, I thought about it. Thought about telling them I wasn't gay after all, thought of hiding who I was for the rest of high school and maybe go to college and then I could be me. But it just... I couldn't. I'd trusted them and they pulled the rug out from under me as if I weren't their son; as if I were nothing. 'You can either be something you're not or I won't have you as my son anymore,' and all this without even the excuse of religious extremism. As if my having children or not had anything to do with them. As if I were less likely to catch AIDS by them kicking me out. As if they were showing me tough love, slapping my hand for misbehaving."

As he'd been talking, Emery's expressive brown eyes turned as anguished as Josh felt. "Josh..."

He couldn't. He couldn't keep telling Emery this, exposing himself like this, to someone who held the kind of power Emery still held over him, all while looking into eyes that could undo him without trying. This wasn't what he'd rushed over to Central Park to accomplish — there had to be something else he could do to dispel the tension. He got up to retrieve a pair of tweezers only to sit back in front of Emery. "Give me your foot," he said abruptly. "Might as well do something with my hands while we talk."