When Tony Met Adam (Short Story) by Suzanne Brockmann Read Free Book Online Page A

he felt indignation.
Even if he
hadn’t
walked away from the angel at Big’s, so what? He’d made no promises to Tony. And forget about the fact that the idea of
making
those kinds of promises after one single, stupid night was absurd … 
    One single, stupid but unforgettable night, with a man who cared about him.
    Or, more realistically, a man who was pretending to care about him.
    But out of all the memories that he still held from that night, it was the way Tony had touched him right before he left—his hand warm atop Adam’s head—that was the most vivid.
    He hadn’t been touched with such tenderness since he was a child. Since his mother had tucked him in at night. And even then,
those
memories were tarnished by his ability to conjure a very sharp picture of her face, distorted and mottled with anger, as she drove him from the house where he’d lived for his entire sixteen years.
No son of mine …
And
You’re dead to me! Dead!
All because he was honest when his sister found the gay porn magazines he’d hidden—badly, apparently—in his bedroom. He could’ve claimed ignorance, pretended that they were a horrible practical joke perpetuated upon him by the bullies at the high school.
    Instead, he’d told her the truth—that he thought he was gay.
    She spent the next week trying to talk him out of it, trying to convince him that he was wrong. It was just a phase. A reaction to being unpopular at school. She took him to the doctor. She took him to church. She prayed and she wept, and finally he snapped and admitted that he didn’t really
think
he was gay—he knew it. His good friend Carlos from summer camp wasn’t just his friend, he was Adam’s lover. They’d started having sex when Adam was fourteen and …
    Adam had found himself out in the street, locked out of his house, with nowhere to go. Carlos was already in college and unable—unwilling, really—to help him. He had a new boyfriend, and finals were approaching. Besides, guests couldn’t stay overnight in his dorm, so …
    Yeah.
    Adam had had to grow up fast, although lately, when he thought about his years on the street, during his latest monk-like musings, he was starting to realize that maybe he hadn’t grown up at all. Maybe he’d merely—barely—survived. Although Jules’s opinion on the subject, which he’d expounded upon liberally in those last few days when Adam finally moved out of the apartment they’d shared in D.C., was that Adam
hadn’t
survived. He was broken. Jules believed that Adam had been damaged, irreparably, by his family’s rejection and the desperate years that had followed.
    Of course, Jules had been mad as hell that Adam had not only hooked up with another man, but had spent nearly two weeks with him in Jules’s apartment, while Jules was out of the country.
    It was, undeniably, a bastard-asshole thing to do. Which was, in part, why Adam had done it. The mere slips of the past hadn’t made Jules kick him out. His transgression had had to be major.
    And it had worked. He could still remember the expression of total evisceration on Jules’s face.
    And okay. He was wrong about the whole no-one-had-touched-him-like-that-since-he-was-a-child thing.
Jules
had touched him like that, too—with genuine love and tenderness.
    But Adam hadn’t been able to accept such a gift at that time in his life. And, to be fair to his broken, dysfunctional self, Jules’s affection
hadn’t
been unconditional. He’d wanted something that Adam couldn’t give him. He’d wanted love that was combined with fidelity and honesty and commitment. At the time, all those years ago, Adam didn’t even know what those things were—not after spending so many years trading both body and soul for the fleeting security of a meal and a roof over his head. Sex was his currency, his power, his source of both immediate gratification and imminent self-loathing, and love only made it complicated, adding jealousy and fear, anger and mistrust