And maybe not a girl at all.
I quickly boxed that thought up with the rest and tucked it away.
“I’m happy to hear that you like her,” Mom said. “I can’t remember the last time you mentioned being interested in someone.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Football takes up so much time. But yeah, Violet is…nice.”
Christ.
“Well, I’m looking forward to meeting her. Now go on downstairs and eat before your dinner gets cold.”
I practically jumped off the bed, eager to get away from this convo. “Can I bring you anything?”
“Maybe a Hot Pocket later?”
I rolled my eyes, laughing. “You and your Hot Pockets.”
She grinned. “Nutrition at its finest.”
But the fact she was willing to eat at all was a win in my book.
I went back downstairs to a quiet dinner with the tension of perpetual worry strung between Dad, Amelia, and myself like wires, pulling us tight, ready to snap.
The air was different now in the house, every second tainted because each one brought us closer to a time when Mom wasn’t going to be here. Dad left dinner early to seek refuge in the den with his football highlights. Amelia took her phone and went to her room while I cleaned up so that Dazia could sit with Mom.
After the dishes were done and the kitchen dark, I went to my room, stripped down to my boxer-briefs, and tried to get some sleep for yet another early practice. But my body was wide awake and exhausted from the strain of repressing my deepest longings at the same time. I’d been playing a role, lying to myself for so long that I had no idea who I was.
How did it get this far?
Except I knew how. I’d let my own life—my own self—slip out of my grasp the first time I lied to my dad. I didn’t want to repair his broken dreams of a future in the NFL, using my life as a kind of do-over. But that ship had sailed, leaving me stranded on an island of my own making.
And now Mom was sick, and that island felt even more remote. Isolated.
I needed relief. I needed a feeling that was all mine, even if it only lasted a few moments.
I grabbed my phone and pulled up a porn site. My thumbs hovered over the categories, lingering over one in particular, and then quickly moving on.
I picked something vanilla and the video snippet started. As usual, my eyes drifted from the raw act with the woman to the guy’s face. I concentrated on his reactions and movements, telling myself that was okay. What I truly needed wasn’t physical anyway. I needed eye contact. The connection.
I watched for a few minutes, then shut it off and slid my hand into my underwear. I was already hard. I gripped myself, stroking fast, filling my mind’s eye with the guy’s expression, the way he moved, how he gazed into the woman’s eyes with intensity. In my fevered imagination, the woman vanished altogether, and it was just the guy, stroking himself to finish while I watched…
I came so fast I nearly didn’t have time to grab a tissue.
Breathing hard, I lay flat on my back, staring at the ceiling. My release faded quickly, washed away by guilt and shame.
What is wrong with me?
Sleep started to drag me down. My hand reached across the empty space of my bed for something—or someone—to hold on to and found nothing.
Chapter Two
“The first day of school,” I muttered, regarding myself in the full-length mirror in my bedroom. “What a joke.”
What did anyone at a pitiful little high school tucked in a redwood forest think they could possibly teach me? I’d been to the edge of the abyss and back. There was nothing left for me to learn but how to survive with the scars it gave me.
Everything—and everyone else—could go to hell.
Do you want the money or not?
“On the other hand…”
I drew on Gucci jeans, a long sleeve black button down, and black Balenciaga boots as morning sunlight streamed in from the bay windows and spilled across the cedar floors of the guesthouse Mags and Reg set me up in.
Admittedly, they’d done good. I had a mini-living room, bathroom, king-sized bed, an ocean view, and built-in bookshelves that ran the length of one wall. I’d already begun filling the shelves with the dozens of books I’d bought over the last few weeks and my own journals.
Though the view outside my window forecast a sun-drenched day, I put on a heavy black pea coat and looped an emerald green scarf with gold paisley swirls around my neck. My armor.
“You’re not physically cold,” said the Ghost of Therapy Sessions Past. “It’s a psychological manifestation of the trauma you endured during the conversion therapy.”
I’d had an entire year’s worth of round-the-clock treatment and that “false cold” still felt pretty fucking real to me.
A soft knock came at the front door of the guesthouse.
“Mr. Holden? You will be late for school.”
Beatriz Alves, the Brazilian housekeeper, was the only person in this house I could tolerate, including myself.
“Bom dia, Beatriz. Estou indo.”
“Muito bem, senhor.”
On my way out, I closed my journal—the black-and-white speckled kind you could find anywhere—and set it on the stack of others like it on my mahogany desk. More journals filled a locked trunk I kept under the window. My life story. A story I’d been writing since I was ten years old and desperate for an outlet for the clamoring voices in my mind.
Loud voices that told me to
