Just What the Truth Is

by Cardeno C.

  Somewhere along the way, I had come to terms with myself, and now my parents’ behavior struck me as completely out of line and outrageous. Even though I knew they weren’t acting any differently than they had my entire life.

  Maybe my brother was right. Maybe it was hopeless to try to change their viewpoint on this. Maybe finding myself really did mean losing my parents. And cue the waterworks.

  Let’s both take a moment to be grateful that you’re reading this and not actually watching it all go down, because there’s nothing more pathetic than a guy in his midthirties crying over his mommy.

  I must have fallen asleep at some point, because when I heard my phone ringing and poked my head out from underneath the blanket, it was pitch black. I fumbled on the nightstand and eventually brought the phone to my ear. “’Lo.” Damn, did my voice sound as bad outside as it did in my head? All scratchy and sore, like I had been singing or yelling or crying. Okay, yeah, it was the last one, but I was holding out hope it wouldn’t be obvious.

  “Shit.” It was Noah. “That bad, huh?”

  There was no point in denying it. “Uh-huh.”

  He let out a long, loud sigh. “I’m coming with you the next time you go over there.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Noah. They’re as bad as I’ve ever seen them. We can’t subject Clark to that.”

  “Not Clark. Just me.”

  I was shocked speechless. Noah had absolutely refused to come to any family gathering—whether a casual lunch or Christmas dinner—without Clark since the moment he came out. No, it was actually even earlier than that, probably since they started dating, but all of us thought they were just roommates.

  “Why now?” I asked. “You’ve always insisted on bringing him. What’s changed?”

  Another sigh, and then: “You. You’re what’s changed. Look, I gave up on having any kind of decent relationship with Mom and Dad before I entered my teens. But you… I still don’t think it’ll work. I still think they’re hateful assholes. But if you insist on trying, then I’ll be right there by your side. You’re my brother, and I’m not letting you do this alone.”

  I started blubbering again, which was even more humiliating with my tough-guy brother listening to me, but I couldn’t help it. “Thanks, Noah. I didn’t know if I could face them again, but if you’re with me….”

  “Yeah, I know. Get some sleep, Ben. I’ll talk to you later this week, and we’ll figure out a time to go see Mom and Dad. Good night.”

  “Night.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I WISH I could tell you that having Noah come with me to see my parents fixed everything right up. But it didn’t. As long as we didn’t talk about our personal lives, things stayed civil. My father asked about work. My mother took an unnatural interest in the weather. And when we got to the part of the scheduled programming where Noah or I would try to get through to them about who we were, it all fell apart and we were back to square one. The whole thing was frustrating to say the least.

  Seeing as how my relationship with my parents was on life support as it was, I decided that it made sense to just pull the Band-Aid of denial off in one fast motion. So I made plans with the guy in my circle of friends who found it damn near impossible to keep any sort of secret under wraps and explained why I would no longer be bringing women to parties or going trolling with him at bars. My cell phone was ringing before I made it home that night, and I confirmed the information to a few more people. I figured that’d be the end of it, I had come out. After that, none of my friends raised a fuss, for the most part. But there were definitely a few exceptions.

  I was at my buddy Neil’s house about a week later for a bi-monthly poker game he held. It might have been my imagination that a couple of guys had trouble making eye contact with me or that the people in the kitchen got unusually quiet when I walked into the room. But paranoia could not explain the snide remarks Tristan kept muttering almost under his breath.

  “Oh, I better be careful about bending over like that around Ben” after he picked up a card that he dropped on the floor.

  “This isn’t an invitation” when he walked by the chair where I was sitting and brought his crotch oddly close to my face.

  And then, apropos of nothing at all, “You marched in any parades lately, Benny boy?”

  It took a great deal of self-restraint for me not to slam my cards down on the table before I got up and walked out of the room. Dealing with those types of comments was new for me, and I wasn’t sure how to respond without getting into a fight or inciting even more nasty remarks.

  I had barely made it to the entryway when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around and tightened my fists at my sides, wishing for the first time that I had asked my brother to teach me one or two of his kickboxing moves.

  Neil’s arms flew up, and he took a step back. “Hey, stand down, man. I was just coming to ask if you’re okay.”

  I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m fine. But I’m leaving.”

  Neil shook his head. “Please don’t. Look, Ben, Tristan’s an asshole. You know that. Just ignore him.”

  I dragged my fingers through my hair in frustration. “Yeah, I know. But I’m not going to be the butt of his jokes all night.”

  “So you’re just going to let him push you out of here? That’s exactly what he wants, you know.”

  Yeah, Neil was right. And I didn’t want to give that smug bastard the satisfaction of knowing he’d succeeded. “Okay, fine. I’ll go back in there, but I’m done taking Tristan’s crap.”

  Neil covered his mouth with his hand and tried to hold back a laugh.

  “What?” I asked. He shook his head. “What?” I repeated more loudly.

  “Nothing, it’s just….” He laughed again. “If you go in there and talk about ‘taking his crap’ and being the ‘butt of his jokes’, he might implode from all the gay joke opportunities.”

  I smacked Neil’s shoulder. “Very nice, Neil. I thought you were on my side here.” My smile took the sting out of my words. Frankly, I was relieved that I could have a conversation with at least one old friend without feeling uncomfortable. “All right, let’s go back in there.”

  We hadn’t even gotten far enough into the room to take our seats when Tristan got back to his commentary, no longer bothering with any pretense of subtlety.

  “Are you feeling better now, Ben? I bet it had to hurt to sit down for so long considering what you take up your ass nowadays.”

  I stumbled to a halt, trying to formulate some sort of response, but Neil beat me to it.

  “You have a lot of experience getting fucked up the ass, Tristan? No? Then keep your helpful insight to yourself.”

  Drunk-as-usual Clayton joined in. “I used to date a chick that liked to take it in the back door,” he slurred. “And she never had any problem sitting around after.” He took a swig of his beer and then quickly set it down, causing it to tip and splash on the table. “And it ain’t ’cause I’m small, neither. I’d whip it out to show you that I’m packin’, but I’m a grow-er not a show-er, so….” He finished his thought with a shrug and drained the rest of his beer.

  Tristan scowled at Clayton and then looked around the table. “So we’re all just going to sit here and pretend like everything’s normal? Doesn’t it bother any of you that Ben’s suddenly decided to start fucking guys?”

  Jack, who was usually a reserved, goes-to-church-on-Sundays, has-a-wife-and-three-kids-and-coaches-kids’-football type of man, apparently decided he’d had enough of the entire conversation, because he glared at Tristan and raised his voice for what might have been the first time in his life. “I don’t care who Ben’s fucking, but I do care who I’m fucking, and if I don’t get home at a reasonable hour tonight, that’ll be nobody. I have no interest in spending the night on the couch, so let’s stop talking about Ben’s love life and start focusing on cards.”

  That seemed to do the trick, because everybody settled down, and we played poker.
r />   DESPITE all the family pain and the awkwardness with my friends, I was still happier than I ever had been in my life. I was spending a lot of time with my brother, connecting in a way that we never had as kids. I made new friends, many of whom I met through Noah or Micah. And even though I hadn’t known them long, I felt closer to my new friends than I did to the guys I had been hanging around with for years. Plus, I reconnected with an old friend—Clark and I were almost as tight as we had been when we were younger.

  Put that together with the fact that my stomach no longer felt like it was eating itself due to constant anxiety, and it would have been enough to make me glad I had finally taken ownership and control of my life. And then there was Micah. Sharp as a whip, sexy as sin, and 100 percent mine.

  He was working like a dog, getting ready for his upcoming trial while simultaneously trying to broker some kind of settlement and managing the rest of his case load. I think the man billed more hours during that three-month period than some lawyers did in half the year. But through it all, he made time for me.

  Most evenings he pulled himself away from the office to have dinner with me, and at least a couple of days a week he shut down and got home at a reasonable hour so we could spend the night together. Well, I thought we were spending the night together. The reduction in my stress level had a proportionate impact on my ability to sleep soundly, which meant I fell asleep and stayed that way until morning. Especially when I was in Micah’s bed.

  But on the second Sunday in September, I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and noticed that Micah’s side of the bed was empty. After draining my bladder, I stumbled out of the bathroom to go look for him. A sliver of light leaking from underneath the door to his home office told me exactly where to find my wayward boyfriend.

  I turned the knob and pushed the door open. Micah was sprawled on the ground, surrounded by papers. I blinked my eyes rapidly, trying to get used to the suddenly bright light. “What’re you doing? How long have you been up?”

  Micah’s head jerked up. “Oh! You startled me.” He jumped to his feet and rushed over to me, then rubbed his hands over the sides of my arms at a rapid pace. “Did I wake you, honey? I’m sorry.” The words raced out of his mouth.

  My eyes had finally adjusted to the light, and I looked around the room, noticing an empty coffee carafe. It looked like a twelve cup. Maybe fourteen. “Since when do you drink coffee?”

  He shrugged and shifted from foot to foot. Not like he was nervous, more like he couldn’t stay still. “I get more bang for my buck than with the tea this way. It’s been helping me stay up.”

  “How long have you been doing this?” I asked, and then I shook my head. It didn’t matter. “Micah, it’s like one in the morning or something. Can you stop for the night and come to bed?”

  Those now familiar arms wrapped around me and pulled me close. I could feel his heart racing, and his breath was hitting my neck in an unusually fast clip. “I don’t think I can sleep just yet.” His head snapped back, and he looked at me. “Hey, can I show you something? I think I’ve figured out how to settle this thing before the trial starts on Wednesday, but I need a second set of eyes.”

  I dipped my head forward and kissed his soft lips. My hands found their way to his cheeks, and I stroked his beard. “Sure. But just remember that my last involvement with anything litigation related was in moot court during law school, and the only thing I know about your case is what you’ve told me and what I’ve heard people say here and there around the office.”

  He nodded, the pace so unnaturally fast that his head bobbed like one of those ridiculous dolls they hand out at baseball games. “Yeah, okay. So you know how our guy denies that he had an offer to sell the company until after the plaintiff had already told him that he wanted to terminate their partnership? But the plaintiff, our guy’s former business partner, claims the offer came in like a month before he ever talked about leaving and that our guy hid it from him and then conned him into selling at rock-bottom price so our guy could turn around and sell it to the buyer and pocket the whole windfall?”

  “Uh huh.” That much I knew. Our client had created some sort of irrigation supply company with one of his classmates from graduate school. Ten years later, they were doing really well, and the business partner wanted to get out of the industry. They came to an agreement on price, and our client bought his partner out. A month later there was some shift in the industry, and a bigger company came in and made our client an offer worth ten times as much as what he had spent to buy out his partner. Our guy sold, his former business partner heard about the deal, and litigation ensued.

  “So every letter and calendar entry is dated at least a month after our client had bought out his partner. Plus the new owner confirms our timeline. But we keep getting tripped up because of this e-mail we found when we were pulling all sorts of communication during discovery. We were required to disclose it, so we did, and it’s been killing our case ever since.” Micah dropped to the ground and sifted through the papers, finding the one he wanted and then handing it to me. “See? It’s dated thirty-two days before our client bought out his partner, and it says that he was approached by the buyer to sell the company. It even has the offering price. The plaintiff says he wasn’t told about this and, if he had been, he’d have waited a month and sold right along with our client so he could make more money.”

  “Okay. So what’d you find?” Honestly, I questioned whether Micah was even capable of logical thought in his current state. I had never seen anyone so hopped up on caffeine.

  “Well, the subject line in that e-mail has always bothered me. Supposedly the client was writing to his wife with this great news about how they were going to make all sorts of money. And the subject line is….”

  I looked at the e-mail and read the subject line out loud. “One more thing.”

  Again with the bobblehead nod. “Yeah. That’s weird, right? I mean, they’re about to make enough money to retire and travel the globe or buy a mansion, or, hell, both, and that’s just one more thing? Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Okay. I can see that, I guess. But the body of this e-mail is pretty clear, Micah. So’s the date. And if it came from your client’s computer….”

  Micah sat down and patted the spot next to him. “True enough. But it still bothered me, so I met with the IT guys last week and talked to them about their system. Turns out they back everything up at the end of the week in an offsite location. I asked them to find the backup tapes from this time period and send me all the e-mails our client sent or received. Take a look at this.”

  He handed me another e-mail. It was from our client to his wife, just like the previous e-mail. It had the same date, time, and subject line. But the body was completely different.

  “This is about how he’s going to be working late so he’ll have to meet her at this dinner, or whatever, that night,” I summarized.

  “Exactly! Same subject, same date and time, totally different body. So I got to thinking, maybe someone messed with the e-mail after he sent it.” His eyes were wide with excitement, and his pupils were dilated. I needed to hide the coffee maker.

  “Is that possible?” I asked calmly.

  “On Outlook it is. I tested it. You can go into your sent e-mails and edit one of them, then save it, and it shows up with the same date and time and no way to know that it was changed after the fact. But that doesn’t change anything in the backups they make, because they’re stored apart from the regular system.”

  Well, Micah was jittery and high on caffeine, but it sounded like he had made a major breakthrough in the case. Of course he had. The man was a genius. It was one of the things that attracted me to him, along with his drive and determination. But that didn’t mean I was going to watch him work himself into the ground.

  “I think you’re onto something. Of course you still need to figure out how someone got into our client’s e-mail so they could change it, but it seems pretty clear that this e
-mail he supposedly sent to his wife isn’t real.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was going to do next,” he said as he looked around the room, clearly trying to decide where to start with that task.

  I took his hand in mine and tugged him toward the door. “Not tonight, you’re not. You’ve already done the hard part. Tomorrow you can figure out the other details. Right now, you need some rest.”

  “Honestly, Ben, I think I’m too wound up to sleep.”

  Well, that wasn’t going to dissuade me. I got us to the door and turned off the light. “Let me worry about that.” I turned back and kissed him gently. “I think I’ve picked up some good ideas on how to relax you over the past few months.”

  Chapter Twenty

  DESPITE his predisposition to work constantly, Micah followed me without any further complaint. By the time we got to the bedroom, his chest was pressed up against my back and he was licking my ear and groping whatever parts of my body he could reach.

  “Six,” he mumbled into my neck.

  “What?”

  “We’ve been seeing each other for almost six months.”

  He was right. Our first dinner together had been in early April, and it was already mid-September. In some ways, the time had flown by. But in other ways, when I looked back at my life back then, it seemed like it belonged to somebody else, like I had been somebody else. I guessed in some ways I had been somebody else; I had been the person everyone expected me to be. And now, I was me.

  I kept walking until we were in the bathroom, and then I twisted around and pushed Micah’s sweatpants down and yanked his T-shirt off. I hadn’t bothered getting dressed when I had gone searching for him, so that was all it took for us to be skin to skin from head to toe and everywhere in between. Our lips met, and the kiss was instantly intense. Micah’s tongue invaded my mouth, his hands grasped my ass, and that wiry body ground against mine.