by A. E. Wasp
He hesitated, a hand on the window frame. The car exhaust billowed about behind the old Outback in a white cloud. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” He hated to ask, hated how it sounded.
Robbie’s face, which had been open and smiling even though he looked as tired as Paul felt, closed down. His smile dropped, and he sighed. “No. I won’t tell anyone. Your secret is safe with me.”
“I’m sorry,” Paul said, fingers tightening around the door.
“For what?” Robbie asked, voice flat.
For not being brave, for using you, for wanting to hide. “I don’t know.” Paul shook his head.
“Well, if you figure it out, give me a call. See you tonight,” he added, putting the car into gear.
Paul stood up, hands off the car. “Yeah. Tonight,” he echoed. Tonight at the second of their two games in a row. He was going to be useless if he didn’t get some sleep.
With a sigh, he headed towards the motel, deliberately not watching Robbie drive away.
There had to be a way he could sneak in unnoticed. When he’d asked LaRue to cover for him last night, he hadn’t cared about getting back in. His only thought had been to run. To get away. Breaking curfew had been the least of his worries.
Last night, before Robbie, he hadn’t cared much about anything. Now he found he actually did care if he got kicked off the team.
Thank goodness his room key also unlocked the door off the parking lot. He could sneak down the unfortunately well-lit hallways and be in his room before anyone knew he’d been gone. Besides, he can always say he had gone for a walk.
He replayed the night’s events in his head, trying to hold back a smile. Maybe he’d be able to see Robbie today before the game.
“Chip,” a man’s voice barked from behind him.
Paul felt his heart actually lurch, stop, and start again. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. No one outside of his family still called him that.
Shit. He stopped, forced his shoulders to relax, and plastered on a smile before he turned to face the last person he’d expected to see in Bemidji, Minnesota.
His father had driven him to meet the team for these road games right from Eubee’s funeral. Paul couldn’t remember if they’d said two words to each other either during the funeral or the drive, but he did remember his father’s arm around him the entire time and the way he’d taken care of everything Paul had needed.
“Dad! What are you doing here? Is mom okay?”
He knew it was a stupid question but low-level concern for his mother was always there. She’d finished her chemo last month, but she hadn’t bounced back from this round as well as she had from the previous ones. But if his mother had gotten worse, Stoney certainly wouldn’t be flying to Minnesota to tell Paul.
Paul had volunteered to take a semester off and stay home to care for her, but she’d insisted he stay in school. They texted a lot, FaceTimed when they could, and he sent her pictures of every game.
“Your mother is fine,” his father said, dismissing his concern as usual. He refused to even contemplate the idea that his wife might finally succumb to the ovarian cancer that had plagued her for the last few years.
“So did you decided to come and see the game? Spend New Year’s with the team?” He tried to make it sound like he thought it was a happy surprise as if his father would have taken a middle of the night flight from Alabama just to watch a non-championship hockey game.
“Who was that boy who dropped you off?” Paul Stonewall Dyson, Senior, or Stoney as he’d been called when he’d played football, did not sound even the least bit happy.
Fuck. Fuck. God-dang it. “Just a friend. He’s playing with the Chargers now. We went and got breakfast.” Even he didn’t believe his own excuse.
“You have a friend in Bemidji?” His father lifted a hand before Paul could even answer. “Whatever lie you’re coming up with, I don’t want to hear it.” He held his cell phone up like it should mean something to Paul. “I want answers from you, and I want them now. Then we’ll see if you’ll even be playing hockey anymore.”
Paul’s stomach dropped. Good thing he hadn’t eaten anything yet or it would be on the floor. He had no idea what his father had found, but there was no doubt it was incriminating. Paul wracked his brains. What had he done wrong recently that his father could have found out about?
He couldn’t know about last night already, could he?
Stoney may have lost most of his peak football muscles, but he was still a big man. Paul looked a lot like his dad had at his age. Tall, blond, not bulky but strong.
“Find someplace private for us to talk, son. Unless you want to have this discussion in the hallway. Obviously, you have no qualms about displaying your…proclivities…in public.” Disgust shone from his eyes.
Oh, holy fucking hell. Whatever this was about, it was serious. Paul looked around for someplace private. His room was out, and the lobby was too public. He smelled chlorine.
“How about the indoor pool? It’s early enough that no one should be there.”
His father nodded curtly, and Paul led the way down the labyrinth of hallways. Dead man walking, he thought, as the waves of his father’s anger beat against his back.
Humidity slapped him in the face as he pushed the door open. His father followed silently, leather dress shoes slapping against the tiled floor.
They sat at one of the small tables by the edge of the pool. Paul crossed his hands and waited for his father to speak.
Stoney stared at him across the table. It was one of his favorite tactics, letting the uncomfortable silence stretch while the object of his glare searched their mind for any wrongdoings and then finally bursting out with something self-incriminating.
It hadn’t worked on Paul in years. He met his father’s gaze calmly, holding on to the memory of last night like a talisman. Whatever the consequences of this conversation, no one could ever take that away from him.
Stoney broke first, sliding his cell phone across the table. “Would you like to explain these photos?”
Paul frowned and picked up the phone. The torso of a muscular man wearing nothing but a gold lame G-string stuffed with crumpled dollar bills stared up at him. The band around his chest loosened a little. He’d been expecting worse. Okay, he could do damage control for this easy enough.
He swiped through the rest of the photos, double-checking that there were no pictures of him with any of the strippers. So far, so good. It looked like these were pictures from his phone, so there were none of him.
He was usually so careful to not take any pictures that could be even remotely incriminating that he’d forgotten his father had all his texts and pictures automatically uploaded to the cloud.
“What about them?” he asked his dad. “Oh, that’s a good one.” He turned the phone to his father to show him an obviously drunk girl in a tiny dress and a pink sash reading ‘bride to be’ hanging over a different nearly naked guy.
His father grabbed the phone back. “What were you doing at a place like this?”
“It was Shelly’s bachelorette party. The girls wanted someone to be the designated driver, so I volunteered. Figured I could keep them out of trouble.” Paul threw the ball back into his father’s court. “Should I have let them go alone and drive drunk?”
His father thumbed slowly through the pictures. “That still doesn’t explain why you felt the need to take so many pictures of just the men.” His eyebrows raised, and he lingered on one of the pictures.
Paul restrained himself from asking to see which picture.
Stoney laid the phone down on the table. He leaned forward, arms resting on the edge.
Paul forced himself not to lean back and show fear or lean forward and look like he was threatening his father.
“You know your mother and I have prayed for you for years,” his father said sorrowfully.
Oh, Paul knew quite well.
He’d known there was something wrong with him since he was four years old and had begged
and begged for the purple sneakers so hard that his mother had given in and bought them.
When his father came home and saw him wearing them, he’d lost his mind. Ranting about how no son of his was going to wear girls’ clothes and in this house, they knew that men and women each had roles to play and a lot of other things little Paul hadn’t understood for years.
By the time puberty hit and he could no longer deny that he didn’t feel the way about girls he was supposed to, he understood all too well what his father had been worried about. What he had been right to worry about.
The door opened, and a woman in a one-piece bathing suit with a swim cap and goggles on her head entered the pool. They waited until she dove in, slicing cleanly through the water. They could hear the quiet slap of water against the sides of the pool.
Stoney dropped his voice. “If you can’t control your behavior, we will have no choice but to pull you out of this school and send you someplace where they can,” he swallowed like the word was stuck in his throat, “cure you.”
Paul’s blood froze. He’d been living under that threat all through his teens. He was twenty-two now. Too old to be threatened. Now he did lean forward, speaking forcefully but quietly. “You can’t make me go anywhere anymore. I’m an adult.”
His father sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair. He stared at Paul again, but there was no attempt to intimidate this time. Stoney looked thoughtful as if he were evaluating and assessing his son. He reached for Paul’s hand.
Confused, Paul took it. Stoney wasn’t usually a touchy person, especially with his son.
“I love you, son,” he said much to Paul’s surprise. “You know that, don’t you?”
Paul hadn’t, actually. Well, no, that was wrong. When he was little, even after the sneaker incident, he had been secure in the knowledge of two truths. His parents loved him, and Heavenly Father loved him.
Years of struggling with being gay had eroded both beliefs.
He had no idea how to answer his father, so he just sat there.
“Everything I do, I do because I love you. I’m just trying my best to keep you from a life of sin and sorrow and everlasting death. To live as a…” He turned away, rubbed his face and turned back. “To live in an unnatural way only ends in heartbreak. I know. Trust me.”
He covered his mouth with his hand, resting an elbow on the table as if he were stopping himself from saying anything more.
Paul tilted his head back, trying not to let his father notice he was blinking back tears.
Stoney drew a ragged breath. “But, Paul,” he continued, voice hard, “if you can’t promise me that there’ll be no more of this—” he waved the phone. Paul caught flashes of the incriminating photos. “Then I will have no choice but to pull all financial support and cut you off from all contact with your mother and your sister.”
“No!” The cry burst out of him against his will. He couldn’t be cut off from his mother and his baby sister. They were his only family. Stoney never spoke to or about his family. Paul had gotten the feeling over the years that they had major disagreements over religion. His dad’s parents definitely weren’t saved. He thought they might be Catholic?
He vaguely remembered meeting his mother’s parents and brothers when he was little. But they’d eventually stopped coming around, too.
All he had was his small family and his church family. They loved him, and he loved them.
So those were his choices: hide who he really was, deny his true desires, then fake interest in, date, and eventually marry some woman all to keep his family and his career; or give in to the demands of his body and lose everything.
No contest. His family meant everything to him, and he’d been working towards a career in hockey since he was six years old.
So why did he feel like the part of him that hadn’t died with Eubee was dying? At this rate, there would be nothing left of Paul Stonewall Dyson, Junior.
The woman swimming in the pool flipped around and pushed off the edge. Two teenage girls came in, their voices echoing off the tiled walls.
Paul closed his eyes and pushed the memory of last night deep down. He could do this. It was for the best. Opening his eyes, he forced a smile. “There’s nothing to worry about, Dad. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Stoney nodded once. “Good.” Nodded again. “Glad to hear that.” He reached across the table for Paul’s hands. “Let’s pray on it.”
Paul dared a look around the room to see if they were being watched. His being Christian wasn’t a secret he kept like his sexuality. Growing up, he’d assumed everyone in the world was.
There was a period during middle school where he’d bought into the whole ‘Christians are persecuted’ mindset. As he grew up and got more exposure he got to other cultures, he realized there was a large group of people who simply didn’t care about religion. Who didn’t take the Bible as the inviolate word of some god.
Despite the school being in the middle of the Bible belt, Paul was the only player on the team from south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Eleven of the 28 players were from Canada and one guy, Richard Buri, was from Slovakia. Paul had had to look the country up on a map.
No one went to church. Their reactions to the particularly Southern version of Christianity ranged from bemused indifference to outright hostility. So Paul had stopped going to church and kept his beliefs to himself.
He was fascinated by these people. They didn’t spend their whole lives trying to be Christ-like and worrying about judgement either from the Church or God himself.
Of course, they also didn’t feel the peace of knowing they were loved no matter what. But the more time he spent with them, the more he began to suspect that love, as defined by the people and Church in his world, was more conditional than he had been taught.
Slowly, he reached for his father’s hands.
“You lead us,” Stoney said.
Paul clenched his teeth on a sigh. This was his life now. Robbie’s face flashed before his eyes. This was his fault. If he had just left Paul alone last night, Paul wouldn’t have been forced into this choice. He’d made his choices before he’d left the hotel.
Paul wanted to be the son his father wanted and needed him to be. He wanted to believe completely and unquestioningly in a loving God the way he had when was a child.
But he’d prayed for years to feel differently, to feel for girls what he did for boys. His prayers had gone unanswered, and he didn’t know what to make of that. It was easier not to think about it
His father squeezed his hands, and Paul bowed his head.
“Heavenly Father,” he started, the familiar words coming effortlessly to his lips. “I come to You in prayer asking for the forgiveness of my sins. I confess with my mouth and believe in my heart that Jesus is your Son.”
Stoney’s voice joined his, and they finished the prayer together.
“Why don’t you go up to your room and get some rest?” Stoney said.
Paul nodded. He gathered his stuff without making eye contact with his father, then left the room.
Halfway to the elevator, he realized he’d left his cell phone on the table with his father. Damn it. He really didn’t want to see his dad again.
Maybe he would just leave it and get it later when he met back up with Stoney. They hadn’t made any plans, but Paul had no doubt his dad would be his shadow all day.
Paul pressed the button for the elevator. But what if Robbie texted? He didn’t want his dad to see that and start asking questions.
Feet dragging, he made his way slowly back to the pool.
The hallway smelled like chlorine as he peered through the door to see if his father was still inside. He was. Stoney sat at the table, his back to the door. Paul pushed the door open, and a blast of hot air hit his face.
The closer he got to his father, the more he got the feeling something was wrong. Stoney’s shoulders shook.
Was he crying?
Paul froze. He heard his father’s shaky
inhale. Saw him smooth his hand over something on the table. Paul risked a few quiet steps closer. It looked like an old photo.
Forget the phone. There was no way he was getting involved in whatever was going on there. Keeping an eye on his dad, Paul backed out of the room as quickly and silently as he could.
He’d spent the rest of the day under the watchful eye of his father. Stoney even sat in the room while Paul napped fitfully. By game time, Paul was beyond exhausted. Rage filled him at the way his father and everyone he knew could take something as wonderful as he had with Robbie (and Eubee) and turn it into something hateful. Make it a sin.
It had only been one night, but Paul had been able to see the faintest outlines of a future that might just hold the promise of happiness. Then his father had come and dragged him back into the shadows where all his doubts and fears lived.
As he took the ice, all he could see was a dark, cold future, without his mother and without any hope of love.
He was ready to hit someone. Any one.
7
Robbie
The day hadn’t gone at all like Robbie had expected it to go. Not only did he not get to see Paul again, something he’d been hoping for in the back of his mind, but the headache he’d woken with only got worse as the day went on.
He spent most of the day in a dark room with a cold washrag over his eyes. By game time, the migraine medicine his doctor had prescribed had pushed the worst of the pain away, but his legs were weak and shaky. And not in a good way like they had been the night before.
During warm up, he scanned the Chargers’ bench, hoping to catch Paul’s eye and explain why he hadn’t so much as texted all day. But Paul pointedly ignored him as he warmed up, keeping as much ice and as many people as he could between them.
Fine. Whatever. Robbie didn’t have the energy to deal with his morning-after regrets. He wasn’t the first bi-curious-at-night, freaked-out-in-the-morning jock Robbie had fooled around with.
