What You Own Read online

  He squatted down and ran his hands along the tire. “Maybe it isn’t damaged. Maybe it—wait. Look, your cap is gone. Maybe it’s only flat and needs air.”

  Sure enough, the little cap over my valve stem was gone. Shouldn’t be enough to leak that much air so fast, though, but I liked Adam’s idea better than mine. A flat tire could be filled, but a busted tire had to be patched or replaced. “I don’t guess you’ve got an air pump in that fancy car of yours?”

  Adam shook his head as he stood. “Sorry.”

  “I think my daddy’s got one, but it’s too late to call him.” I’d have to do it in the morning and hope I could get this problem fixed before work. I tugged my phone out of my pocket.

  “I thought you weren’t calling your dad.”

  “I’m not. I’m calling Ellie to come back and get me.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  “After last night? No thanks.”

  Adam flinched. “Last night wasn’t so bad.”

  I didn’t know if I should shake him or hug him. “Which part wasn’t so bad? The part where you told me you had brain damage because of the bashing, or the part where I acted a fuckin’ fool and kissed you?”

  His eyes went hard. “My memory gaps are not your fault, and you didn’t know about them because no one told you. No one else knew because my father told me to tell people I didn’t want to talk about it, instead of admitting I didn’t remember.”

  I balled my hands into fists. “Because God forbid Raymond Langley have a less than perfect son.”

  “Something like that. And you’re no more a fool than I am, Ryan Sanders. Maybe I’m the bigger fool here, because I listened to my father, instead of following my heart. I let him handle me my entire life, because I’m not strong enough to stand on my own two feet.”

  “Bullshit. You were strong enough to come find me at Pizza City. Maybe if things had been different, if I hadn’t kissed you, then we’d be strong together now. We were always stronger when we were together.”

  “Kissing me didn’t get us bashed, Rye, so stop saying that.” He grabbed my forearm, skin warm and rough, and held tight. “We got bashed because Chad is a bigoted asshole who got drunk with his pals and decided we were easy targets. Everything that happened is their fault, not yours.”

  “So everybody says.” I yanked free from his hold, too aware of his touch and his proximity. I needed to get away. Being near him was like poking at an electric fence with a stick. I felt him buzzing all over my damned skin. I needed to pull him close or get the fuck away.

  “Who’s everybody?”

  “My parents, Ellie, my shrink.”

  Adam blinked. “Shrink?”

  Bleeding hell, why had I let that slip? “I take stuff for anxiety.”

  “Because of the bashing?”

  “No, because of my fear of triangles,” I snapped. Pull him close or get away. “Yes, the bashing, Adam, fuck.”

  His cold blue eyes went all sad and liquid again, and I reached for him. I actually reached a hand out to touch him, before pulling back because you aren’t supposed to touch electric fences. He saw it, though, and he was braver than me, so Adam yanked me forward into a tight, full-body hug. He hugged like he wanted to pull me right inside himself, and I hugged him back. Felt every curve and hard plane, every muscle and shape, his heart hammering in his chest. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and melted into the embrace, breathed him in.

  He didn’t say anything stupid like “I’m sorry.” He held me, and I held him, and some of that buzzing died down now that I had him in my arms. Right where he should have been all these years. We existed in another perfect moment.

  And then a car roared past, bringing with it the phantom sound of Adam’s arm being snapped. Dark. Parking lot.

  I ripped away from him. “No!”

  Chapter Six

  Adam

  “No!”

  Ryan’s wrenched shout hit me in the gut like a sucker punch. He looked so lost, so breakable, that I wanted to hug him again. I desperately wanted to make that awful, wide-eyed fear go away. To get his eyes to stop looking so haunted by a night we’d shared but only he remembered. And he was fighting me on it every step of the way, the stubborn Texas mule.

  He turned in a circle, taking in the entire parking lot, and I understood. “It’s okay, Rye, we’re alone,” I said. “It’s you and me.”

  He sagged against his car door, breathing hard through his mouth, sickly pale like he’d been last night when he found out I didn’t remember the bashing. I hated that I’d done that to him again. I wanted this part over with. I wanted him to tell me what I’d forgotten so we could get past it and maybe, just maybe, move on with our lives—together.

  We can’t be together. Father will find a way to ruin this too. It’s why you had a plan, idiot.

  I pushed away the voice of doubt, the voice that dogged me and goaded me and sometimes even guided me. But the voice wasn’t always right. Ryan wanted me back; I saw it in his eyes and in his actions. He wouldn’t pursue this without a commitment from me, and I wouldn’t commit until he told me the truth. The whole truth, no condensing of details or prettying the facts.

  The truth was more important than the damned plan, even if the plan was what had kept me going all these years.

  “Come on, get in the car,” I said.

  I opened the passenger door, and he slid inside, melting into the seat. Letting the air out of his tire hadn’t been my finest moment, but I’d needed him in my car somehow. Once this was over—and if he hadn’t punched my lights out—we’d come back and use the electric air pump hidden under a blanket in my trunk.

  He stared at his lap while I drove, occasionally flexing his right wrist. When I went back to school after two months out, a classmate told me she’d seen Ryan with a cast on it after the bashing. He knew everything that had happened to me, and I hadn’t asked about his own injuries. God, how selfish could I be?

  Now wasn’t the right time, and I needed him not to pay attention to where we were going.

  After a few miles of silent driving, I pulled into an empty, weedy parking lot attached to a vacant building. Ryan glanced out the window and jerked upright when he realized we weren’t on the street in front of his building. He twisted in his seat, the force of his anger making me doubt the intelligence of this plan.

  “What in the blue fuck are we doin’ here, Adam?”

  “Talking,” I said.

  “Take me home.”

  “No.”

  “Adam—”

  “No, Ryan.” I’d purposely parked so the headlights illuminated the rear corner of the lot, thirty yards from the old Pizza City restaurant, where a partial wood fence was all that remained of a dumpster enclosure. Time and weather had washed away any evidence that we’d been there, or been beaten unconscious there, in a narrow space between the dumpster enclosure and the back wall of a brick building that had stood empty my entire life. Pizza City was yet another victim of an ever-changing economy and town, having gone out of business two years ago.

  I didn’t miss it.

  I did miss Ryan, and I needed to fix this somehow.

  By bringing him back to the place where three fucknuts tried to kill him?

  Ryan was shaking all over, and it wasn’t from the air conditioning. “Please, Adam, I don’t want to be here.”

  I hated seeing him so scared and uncertain, and he didn’t pull away when I grabbed his left hand. “Have you ever been back?”

  “No.”

  “I have. A few times, actually. I kept hoping it would jog my memory.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “No, it didn’t.” I squeezed his hand and felt pressure in return. “Do you know what it’s like to lose hours of your life? Hours that really matter, even when other people tell you to move on? To always wonder if I could have done something different to save us? To save you?”

  Ryan made a noise that sounded like a choke. “You couldn’t have.”
<
br />   “Why not?”

  His eyes glittered, and my throat closed because I didn’t know if I could stand it if I made him cry. “I don’t want you to have all that ugly in your head. It’s bad enough crammed up in mine.”

  “Maybe if you share it, it won’t be so ugly.”

  He made that harsh sound again. “I shared that ugly once, to the cop who took my statement at the hospital. He said they’d pursue it as attempted murder and a hate crime, and then those assholes got off with community service. Talking about the ugly doesn’t help, Adam, I tried.”

  I hadn’t found out about the deal until it was too late. My father had tried to explain, tried to say it was for the best, because we didn’t need to be dragged through a trial. He’d traded Ryan’s sense of justice and security for keeping our names out of the papers, and holding Ryan’s hand in the dark parking lot where we were beaten up three years ago demonstrated that my father had made a significantly bad decision. I didn’t imagine my father had spent a moment considering Ryan when he made that deal. He had selfishly thought about himself and his company, my needs a distant third.

  He made you so dependent on him that you’ll never stand on your own two feet. You’ll never own your life.

  I hated dragging Ryan through this broken, grief-smeared memory lane, but I couldn’t back down. I had to stand up for myself this time, even against him. “I need to know the ugly, Rye,” I said. “I know remembering it hurts you, but I was there. It’s my ugly to know, and you’re the only person who can tell me. Please.”

  He stared at me for so long that I thought he was doing that thing where he got lost inside his own head for a while. Then he exhaled harshly through his nose, almost a bull snort, and shoved open his door. I left the headlights on and followed him. Our bodies cast long shadows on the cracked asphalt.

  Ryan stopped near the brick wall, a few feet from the old dumpster enclosure. “They kept Pizza City open two extra hours for us,” he said to the wall. “So we could have the cast party after the last show. It was around midnight when you texted me and said you were outside.”

  Texting him made sense. The idea of going inside and facing the cast and crew I’d let down wouldn’t have appealed to me. Father had confiscated my phone after the bashing, so I couldn’t have checked. “Thank you for talking to me,” I said.

  A half smile ghosted across his lips. He looked at me, his skin sallow in the headlight glow. “I missed you so damned much. I was so happy you wanted to talk that I’d have walked barefoot over barbed wire to get to you. Ten feet to the door was nothin’.”

  My heart swelled with emotion. “We came over here to talk?”

  “Yeah. Cars were blocking us from the road and the restaurant. It seemed private enough.”

  “And then we talked?”

  “Yeah. We talked.”…

  …“I’m an asshole, okay?” Adam says. He seems sincere, imploring his best friend in the world to understand. “I don’t really know how to stand up to my father. I wish I did, Rye, I do. I’d have stayed in the musical and defended you to him. I wouldn’t have been such a bastard to you these last two weeks. We wouldn’t have been apart.”

  I study him, taking in everything. Needing to know this isn’t a trick. “I always thought I could count on you, hoss. Out of everybody, I wanted you to have my back.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry I didn’t. I won’t turn my back on you again, I swear.”

  “What about your daddy? I’m still gay, and that’s not gonna change.”

  “He’ll have to get used to a few changes.”

  I don’t dare to hope, but ask anyway. In case hope is rewarded. “Like what else?”

  “Me.” Adam shifts closer, breathing harder.

  “What’s changed in you?”

  “I admitted something to myself today, Rye, for the first time.”

  “Which is?”

  “That I don’t think of you as a friend anymore. My feelings are… stronger.”

  I can’t stop the smile that breaks like sunshine on my face, or calm my racing heart. The moment I’ve dreamed of is here. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nothing in the world will stop me from kissing him in this moment. Adam doesn’t respond right away, too surprised to react properly. I sense the instant that Adam gives in. His mouth softens, lips part. He starts kissing back, his own hunger and need growing. It’s a perfect first kiss.

  “Shit, man, Langley’s a faggot too,” a deep voice says.

  We pull apart, stunned by the interruption. Three boys from school, basketball stars the lot of them, surround Adam and me. Trapping us against the brick wall. Chad Phillips is the tallest. He plays center, and he’s missing a front tooth from taking someone’s elbow last year in a state championship game. His sidekicks, Bobby and Sam, look at us like we’re scum. All three reek of liquor.

  I shift to stand in front of Adam and face down Chad. “Fuck off, Phillips, this isn’t your business.”

  Chad brays laughter. “You two boyfriends now, Sanders? Never took you for a cocksucker, Langley. Shit, I bet the water cooler crowd at LQF is going to love this.”

  Adam trembles behind me. I can’t see it, but I feel it. He’s trying to be brave, but three on two are bad odds, and this isn’t how Adam wants to come out to his father. Adam doesn’t deny anything, though, doesn’t try to talk his way out of what they saw, and I love him more for it.

  Bobby gulps from a flask, then passes it to Chad. Chad takes a healthy pull. “So who fucks who in the ass here, huh? You bend over for him, Langley?” He cups his own junk with his free hand. “Wanna see what a real man’s packing?”

  My temper roars, but Adam steps away from my protection. “No, thanks,” Adam says, perfectly sincere. “I wouldn’t want your mother’s prize poodle to get jealous of you sticking your dick in someone else’s ass.”

  Chad’s speed surprises me, and I can’t stop him from punching Adam square in the chin. Adam stumbles into the brick wall, away from me, his chin cut and bleeding. I shout and tackle Chad to the ground…

  …“I started the fight?” I asked, shocked at my own audacity in accusing Chad of fucking his mother’s poodle.

  “Technically, Chad hit first, so he started the fight.” Ryan’s lighthearted tone didn’t reach his face. He was struggling to report on their activities, the things they’d said, and the stress was taking its toll. “A lot of the actual fightin’ happened so fast. Bobby knocked me off Chad, then started kickin’ me in the ribs and chest. Got me in the face a few times too. Everything got muddled, turned around. Then Sam twisted my right arm back, and he was holdin’ me facedown. I could see Bobby and Chad beatin’ on you.”

  His face went furious, almost feral. “I tried to get to you, Adam, I did. Sam broke my wrist tryin’ to keep me down. I think you must’ve heard me yelling over it, because you got real crazy. I remember you got Bobby in the nose good. Then Chad picked up a broken piece of brick.”

  Ice water trickled down my spine. I knew where this was going.

  “Chad clocked you upside the head with that brick, and you just… stopped. You dropped down, so still, like he’d cut off your engine. Honest to God, I thought he killed you.” A single tear squeezed out and trickled slowly down Ryan’s cheek. I wanted to wipe it away but didn’t dare break the spell. He was lost in the memories now, and while my participation in the event was over, he hadn’t explained yet how my arm was broken.

  “Chad called ‘em all off, and I thought they were gonna leave us alone. My ribs were on fire, and I couldn’t breathe real good, and I was tryin’ to get to you. They were talkin’, still drinkin’ from that flask. Then Chad squats down over you and just… fucking snaps your arm. I’ll never forget that sound.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Bobby and Sam dragged me over to that small space behind the enclosure, where no one could see us from the parking lot. I thought they were gonna kill me.

  “Sam hauled me up, and I almost blacked out from the pain, because t
hree of my ribs were cracked, only I didn’t know it then. Chad was standin’ there, all smug and so drunk he couldn’t find his own ass with both hands.” Ryan shivered, his entire body seeming to fold in on itself as something inside his mind shifted. His eyebrows knotted. He looked at me, those dark-brown wells cold. “Someone from the restaurant called my name. Chad knocked me out, and they all ran. They say Mrs. Proctor found us and called 911.”

  The ending of the story felt edited, but I couldn’t put my finger on which part. And the worn out, beaten up way Ryan was leaning against the old brick wall sent me four steps closer and into his arms again. He collapsed against me, still shaking, holding me so tightly I feared for my ribs. He pressed his face into the crook of my neck. I threaded my fingers into his hair, liking him there, willing to give him whatever he needed.

  He’d given me what I needed: answers. He’d filled in the gaps, detailed those minutes I’d lost because Chad hit me in the head with a piece of brick.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

  Chapter Seven

  Ryan

  Ellie told me once that emotional hangovers can hurt worse than liquor-soaked hangovers, and I finally understood what she meant. Telling all that ugly to Adam, standing in the place where it happened, was like ripping out my guts, tying them into knots, and stuffing them all back inside again. I saw it all as I said it, like I saw it the night it happened. Saw Adam getting hit, going down like wet laundry, laying so still. Heard his arm bone snapping. Felt asphalt and stones under my knees when they dragged me behind the dumpster.

  I thought I was gonna die back there.

  We both lived, though, and here we were—me falling apart and Adam taking care of me like I didn’t take care of him.

  He put me in the car. I dozed while he drove, but he held my hand the entire time, and it was real nice. He helped me up the stairs to my place, then unlocked the door when I fumbled my keys twice like a punch drunk fool. I tripped over a sneaker because the apartment was dark and I didn’t expect that.