Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(47)
Just like that, the grief and remorse was gone and I was back to rage. I snatched the check from his hand, sneering at a dollar figure large enough to cover two years’ worth of books and tuition.
“So, is this hush money? A payoff? An attempt to show me what you can ‘offer’? Or is it payment for services rendered?” I asked bitterly, glaring at him a moment before I began to shred the damn thing with jerky pulls. “Fuck you. It was never about money. I’ll be your dirty secret. I’ll even do it for free. But I won’t be your whore.”
I threw the scraps in the lake and ran from him. It was too clumsy and stumbling to be an actual flounce, because now I was hurt rather than pissed. I probably looked every bit as tragically dramatic as a heroine of the silver screen, fleeing the scene in tears. Except I wasn’t crying, just running as fast as I possibly could until I finally reached the art gallery and dashed inside. Robin looked up in alarm from where he was talking about a painting with a tourist, but I just kept running into the storeroom, practically hiding behind the vertical racks.
I held it together until Robin bade the potential customer farewell and came back five minutes later. Then I burst into tears while he held me and let me cry.
Tired of waiting
So tired of all this waiting
And still I’m contemplating
What I can do to save me
Is there a chance
To bring this back
To where I can care again?
—Casey Stratton, “Waiting”
Mo spent Saturday and Sunday catching up with her mom and dad, so I didn’t see her until Monday. The moment I met her at the coffeehouse, she started grilling me.
“So what is all this? Are you shacking up with these guys?”
“What?” Startled, I nearly dropped my latte. “No! No, it’s not like that. Robin and Geoff are together. They have a baby on the way, for God’s sake. I’m just crashing out with them for a bit.”
“What, because you don’t see enough of them every day at work?”
I shrugged, refusing to meet her eyes. “That’s different. I don’t really get to talk to them, then.”
“Talk about what?” She frowned, sipping her chai carefully.
“Just . . . stuff. You know, I haven’t had many gay friends, especially ones who weren’t clueless college kids just like me. These guys are nice. They’ve got their shit together, they know what it’s like to be where I am, or at least they know people who have been. It’s a good idea, getting to know them.”
“Okay, I can see that, but why can’t you just hang out with them after work or something?”
I forced a smile. “Because sometimes talking involves a few margaritas.” She chuckled, and I slipped through the opening to change the subject. “Plus, it saves on gas. So, how is the archer-slash-gunslinger in Big Rapids?”
“Cody. His name is Cody. And he’s fine.” A slow smile spread across her freckled face. “Really, really, really fine.”
“Aww yeah, girl.” I grinned and breathed a silent sigh of relief as Mo allowed herself to be distracted. She happily chattered on about her archer and his sexy arms while I mentally tied myself in knots about whether I should confess to her. I wouldn’t say my evasion to that point wasn’t at least somewhat selfish; I was relieved not to have to lose her just yet. But if that had been the only problem, I would have come clean anyway, because here she was still thinking she could trust me, behaving as if she could trust me, and the plain fact was, she couldn’t. I sickened myself for misleading her like that. How dare I look her in the eye and act like I still deserved her friendship?
But at the same time, I wasn’t sure it was right to take the choice out of Brendan’s hands, because Robin was right. Confessing would effectively be outing him. Which, as a matter of principle, wasn’t a cool thing to do. At all.
Being in the closet had never really been an option from me. I had a brief period around the seventh-and eighth-grade years, still settling in to my new (very white, very conservative) school district, where I tried denying that I was gay, but when it came down to it, I could never have passed convincingly. At best, people would have just rolled their eyes at my attempts and said I was in denial. My orientation and gender-nonconformity was obvious in everything I did, every gesture, every lilt of my voice, and it had been since I was a child.
But if I could have passed, would I have tried to? Whatever Brendan had done, however insensitive he’d been there at the end, did I have the right to make the decision about whether or not he should come out for him?
It wasn’t as simple as coming clean so that there was no deception in my relationship with Mo. I wished it were. If it had been, the decision would have been, if not easy, then at least straightforward. But there were other issues involved here, some of which—as Robin and Geoff had reminded me—I needed to be sensitive to as a member of the gay community. They’d made sure I considered all the angles before I decided.
People’s lives could be ruined by being outed. And maybe popular opinion was that they deserved it for cheating—or being gay or bi in the first place—but I didn’t think anyone who believed that considered the complete potential cost. People could lose not just their spouses and families, but their jobs, their livelihoods, their friends, their homes. They faced discrimination and homophobic violence and sometimes they even ended up killing themselves.