Destiny (Waiting for Forever) (17 page)

A
S
I
started to wake, I noticed several things all at once. I was naked. My head was pounding. I wasn’t in my room. I wasn’t alone.

Sitting up slowly, I looked around, and my stomach lurched. I hadn’t felt that bad since I’d woken up in the hospital after Mosely had put me in a coma. Just like then, I had no idea what had happened.

“Careful, kid, you’ve probably got one hell of a hangover,” a voice screamed next to me. I looked toward it, squinting and fighting the urge to cover my ears.

“Too loud,” I moaned and tried to roll over, but my body ached and my ass was sore. Slowly, my head started to clear, and I saw Mike propped up next to me with a slight grin on his face. His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked somewhat rough with stubble.

The violent swing in my stomach happened suddenly, and I slapped my hand over my mouth. Mike leaned over the side of the bed quickly and grabbed a small trashcan, handing it to me. Too sick to be embarrassed, I stuck my face in it. Just before the contents of my stomach were lost, I saw what was sitting at the bottom, and my heart stopped.

Two used and tied condoms lay in the empty can.

“Oh God…. Oh God,” I said, wiping my face with my arm and crawling out of the bed, only to realize I was still completely naked. I held the can in front of my crotch as I looked around for my clothes. They were strewn around the bottom of the bed, a silent condemnation of my betrayal. Not bothering with the shirt, I quickly pulled on the jeans and practically ran from the room.

I heard Mike call my name behind me, but I couldn’t face him.

At my own door, I thrust my hand in my pocket and came up empty, trying the other; still nothing. The panicky feeling overpowered the hangover, and I began pounding on my door. Mike appeared in the hallway in his jeans, his hair in complete disarray. Without a word, he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back to his room. I fought, my feet coming off the floor in my attempts to break free of his grasp.

When we were in his room, he put me down and closed the door, then turned back around, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“What the hell is wrong with you? You’re going to wake up the whole house,” Mike said, reaching down to pick up his T-shirt off the floor and put it on. He grabbed mine and threw it to me, and I pulled it on so I didn’t feel quite as exposed, though by that point it didn’t really matter.

“I betrayed him. I gave up everything to come out here and be with him, and I threw away everything we meant to each other by sleeping with some random guy,” I blurted without thinking. Mike flinched, and I felt sick at the look of pain that crossed his face.

“Look, I get that you’re upset,” he said evenly. “But I am not some random guy. I thought we were friends, Brian.”

“I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. We are friends. Please, I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m….”

“Freaking out,” Mike supplied, and I nodded, seriously considering crawling back under the covers and never coming back out again. “There’s nothing to freak out about, Brian; it’s just sex.” He reached over, grabbed his phone, opened it, and sent a message.

“I just sent Kenny a text telling him we weren’t going to be in,” he said casually.

“Oh my God, Kenny,” I said, and my stomach lurched again. Damn it. Mike and I were supposed to be at work. The day was just getting worse and worse.

“As much as I’m sure he’d love to hear you saying that in a slightly different context…,” Mike started with a smirk.

“This isn’t funny, Mike. If I lose this job…. If I can’t…. God, my head hurts.” I felt the bed dip as I sat with my head in my hands, trying desperately not to throw up again.

“Relax, kid,” he said and began to rub my back lightly. “This is why we took you out last night in the first place. You’re so uptight, so wound up all the time, so… so serious. You’re eighteen years old; it’s okay to relax a little. Everyone in this house: me, Leo, Andy, Em, we’re all your friends, and friends look out for each other.” I heard a loud beep, and Mike checked his phone. “Kenny said it’s a light day and he hopes you feel better.”

Mike sat on the bed and leaned back against the headboard as I lay with my head on the pillow next to his hip. Reaching down, he ran his fingers through my hair, pulling it back out of my eyes. It was soothing, easing the ache in my head.

“I haven’t had very many friends,” I admitted quietly.

“What do you mean?” The hand stroking my hair paused for a moment before resuming, and I closed my eyes, trying to will the room to stop spinning.

“My parents were killed during a home invasion when I was three years old. I went into foster care, and until age eleven, I moved from home to home. See, I was there when my… when it happened, and I had some trouble dealing with it. Some of the homes I got placed in had other kids, and they couldn’t deal with my… problems.”

“What kind of problems?” Mike asked, pulling me over so my head was resting on his leg instead of the pillow. I’m not sure if he realized how being touched by someone I trusted comforted me, because I’d been without that almost my whole life.

“Nightmares, mostly. I woke up in so many different places growing up that I woke up screaming almost every night. It wasn’t until I was placed with the Schreibers when I was eleven that I began to get over it. When… when I met Jamie.” I wrapped my arms tighter around his leg, and he lightly rubbed my back.

“You told us that your last name is Schreiber. Did you take their name or something when you came out here?”

“My last name is Schreiber. When I was in school all of the kids thought of me as the foster kid. They figured my parents didn’t want me, so there must be something wrong with me. The only one who looked past that was Jamie. When his parents took him away just before the start of our senior year, I had no one. My secret had come out, and everyone knew I was gay. Soon after the school year started, one of my classmates… he and a couple of his friends put me in the hospital with a broken jaw, broken ribs, and a broken leg. During the two months I stayed home to recover from it, the state investigated the Schreibers, and I was almost taken from them and placed somewhere else. I don’t know if Richard and Carolyn just didn’t realize how much I meant to them or if they just assumed that I wouldn’t want to be adopted, but when the state investigated, it scared them, so they adopted me.” I couldn’t help the smile that came to my face at the thought. Even if I never found Jamie, I would always have two people in my life who loved me without limit. They had chosen me to be their son.

“Wait… what? You’re telling me that your foster parents found out that you were gay and they adopted you anyway?” Mike asked, and his voice sounded choked and hoarse. I sat up slowly and looked at him.

“Richard and Carolyn knew before Jamie left that I was gay. Richard kind of found out by accident because I’d done a search on his computer, but he sat down and talked to me about it. He’s a doctor, so it was more about staying safe and keeping myself protected than feelings and stuff. Carolyn seemed to just know, and she’s the one I talked to about….” Mike’s face had gone hard, colder than I had ever seen his normally jovial expression. “What?”

“You had parents that loved you, adopted you even after they found out that you were gay, and you gave that up to chase after some guy?” He looked sick, and I wondered if he was going to need that wastebasket too, but then he pushed me away and stood up.

“I don’t understand,” I said, frightened by his abrupt change in mood. Something must have shown in my face, because he softened a little.

“I’m going to go get us some breakfast. Why don’t you lie back down for a while? I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Without another word, he turned and walked out the door.

For the next twenty minutes, I lay on his bed with the scent of him surrounding me and stared at the door. Mike was my best friend, even closer than Adam and I had been, and I’d just screwed that up.

When he returned holding a fast-food bag, an orange sports drink, and a coffee cup, he looked like his normal laid-back self. Smiling at me as he set the food on his desk, he turned and closed the door behind him.

“I’m sorry that I made you mad,” I said quickly. Handing me the sports drink, he kept the coffee for himself and threw the bag on the bed between us.

“Baby, I wasn’t mad at you,” he said quietly, reaching into the bag. “Sausage or bacon?”

I took the sausage sandwich and set it on my leg. It was still warm, and the smell made my stomach turn. He set a greasy little bag on top of the sandwich, and I saw hash browns inside.

“You’re dehydrated, you need to drink that,” he said around a mouthful of his own sandwich. I popped open the sports drink and took a small sip, waiting to see if it came back up, relieved when it didn’t. After I’d sipped my way through about half the drink, I tried a bite of the hash browns, and my stomach snarled with hunger. Mike grinned as I started on the sandwich, and he threw his garbage into the can by his bed. Grimacing at the contents I had deposited earlier, he took the can and left the room for a few minutes.

Returning, he set it back down by his bed and started getting his stuff together to go take a shower. Where I had a mesh bag on the back of my door with my stuff, his was scattered all over his dresser. I watched him, finishing my sandwich and the drink.

“Mike, uhm, why did you get upset earlier? What bugs you about me being here?” I asked him tentatively. I didn’t want to argue with him, but if there was a subject we should avoid discussing, I wanted to know. His shoulders sagged, and he stood motionless in front of the dresser for a minute before turning around.

“I like that you’re here, Brian. It’s been a long time since I’ve had someone that I clicked with. The other guys and I get along fine, but you and I have fun together, you know?” He came over to the bed and sat sideways with one leg hanging off the side. He sighed sadly. “I guess since you told me your sob story, it’s only fair that I tell you mine. The only one who knows the whole story is Leo, so I’d like to keep this between us, okay?”

“I’m not going to talk about you,” I said quietly.

“I know, kid. When I was fourteen, I had a friend named Derrick. We were buddies. We played football together, hung out at each other’s houses, stuff like that. One night his parents went out of town, and my parents said he could stay at our house. Now, I’d dated a couple of girls, and so had Derrick. We’d fooled around a little with them, but we were still really just kids. Well, that night we’d started talking about stuff we’d done, and we got kinda horny. We started messin’ around and were jerking each other off when my dad came in to tell us that dinner was ready. It was around that time that I’d started to wonder if maybe I was gay, and that make-out session with Derrick kind of confirmed it because it was a helluva lot hotter than I’d had with any girl. My dad and I got into it, and he threw me out.” He shrugged, but the pain in his face told me much more than his forced casualness.

“What about your mom?” I asked. Of course, I knew it happened, parents throwing away their kids. Tossing them out like garbage for something they couldn’t control. But I never understood it. That’s not what I thought being a parent was about.

“She just stood back and let him do it. God’s wrath, burning in hell, and all that crap. All I heard from her was ‘Micah, how could you turn away from God?’ Then the God-fearing people turned their fourteen-year-old son out in the street with no job, no money, nothing. I thought those Christian freaks were supposed to be loving and charitable,” he said savagely.

“Micah? I figured your name was Michael.”

“Yeah, we covered that last night,” he said, the ghost of a smile reappearing on his lips.

“So, after you left, what did you do?” I asked, unable to imagine how he had survived.

“My big brother Elijah was at college here in San Diego. So I hitched down the coast to where he was. I got pretty good at trading blow jobs for rides with lonely, pervy truckers.” He looked out the window, shocking me with the casual way he talked about prostituting himself just to get a ride to someone who could help. My heart ached for him.

“But when I got down here, he couldn’t help me. I mean, he was just eighteen himself, living in a dorm. His roommate was on spring break, so I stayed in his dorm and ate on his meal card while we tried to figure out what to do. At first, he tried talking to my parents, but they threatened to disown him too. Then he asked around campus and found out about the gay and lesbian center. That’s where I met Leo. I lived and worked at a youth shelter until I turned eighteen. By then I’d saved up enough to try and start my life. Leo helped me get my GED and hooked me up with Kenny. I’ve survived the last nine years, no thanks to my parents,” he finished quietly. “My brother graduated and went to work at my dad’s firm in Northern California. We e-mail, but I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“So when I said that my parents were okay with me being gay and I left anyway, you thought I’d given up all the wrong things,” I guessed, and he nodded. “I didn’t give up my parents, Mike. I talk to them all the time. They weren’t thrilled with the idea of me chasing after Jamie, but they accepted it.”

“Until today, I thought you were a runaway,” he admitted.

“No, I’m not a runaway. I just thought I’d be running to something, and so far I’ve found nothing,” I said with a sigh.

“Okay, before we both get depressed, let’s go take a shower. I can’t stand the bar grime anymore,” Mike said, getting up and grabbing his shower stuff. “Oh, I found your keys; they were on the floor of the Jeep.” He tossed the keys to me, and I threw my garbage from breakfast into the empty can by his bed. In my room, I grabbed my stuff off the back of the door while Mike waited in the hall. Something in our friendship had changed. It was either because we’d had sex, which I still couldn’t remember, or revealed our pasts. Either way, I felt closer to him. It didn’t feel like a romantic kind of closeness like the one I’d felt with Jamie, or the strictly platonic friendship I had with Adam.

We had found a true and lasting friendship, something I didn’t think I’d ever had.