Steamroller

by Mary Calmes

the two-bedroom apartment we had rented and put down the deposit on was tiny, just 325 square feet, but it was livable.

Sheesh

It was a good plan, but Matt bailed on me right before school started because he met a girl and moved in with her instead. It was a crappy thing to do, but I actually understood. The man was in love—he was supposed to give that up for me?

By the Friday night before Christmas, I was dead on my feet. I had worked fourteen straight days because one of the project managers—a fancy title for shift leader—Elliot Hogan, had a baby.

Then they fired Alex Chesney because he was doing free work for people he liked,

Since I was already taking an order from the lady in front of me who was making flyers for her dog grooming business, I picked up the flash drive and tossed it at the closest trash can.

His head moved, but since he was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, it was hard to tell what he was seeing. And seriously, sunglasses at night? I wondered vaguely if all this trouble over him understanding things was simply because he was stoned.

“How do you know how to do all this?” Sawyer asked, close to me, his breath on the side of my neck. “You’re just a baby.” I concentrated on what I was doing, because Sawyer lived to give me crap about my age. He was thirty and the assistant manager of his store, and I was nineteen and held the same position at mine.

As a rule I had no use for football players. They were big dumb jocks who, if I was lucky, ignored me, and if I wasn’t, knocked me around. In high school I got called “faggot” a lot, and sometimes “queerboy,” and with it I was shoved up against my locker or whichever one was closest. There were the times when I was tripped and pushed and even run into during PE. Two ribs were bruised once, but really, the online stuff was the worst.

I needed to help feed the world.

“This is your chance to say sorry.”

Surely, you jest

When I was seventeen, getting ready to start my senior year of high school, I had come out to my mother and stepfather. It had not gone well. They had told me to leave and I had called Matt. I always called Matt. He arrived at my front door with his mother and father and his younger sister, Jaci, in tow. They were all ready to carry things.

My stepfather was a nice man, kind to my mother when she’d never had that before. His first wife had died of cancer very young, and he really tried to like me—before he knew I was gay—because it was the Christian thing to do, even though I was born out of wedlock.

parents never married, so I was basically a bastard, a fact Gary made certain to mention to both me and my mother on many occasions.

“He told me to tell you—if the subject ever came up about him caring if you were gay—that homosexuality is not something he gives a crap about, but he won’t abide show tunes and would prefer they were not played in his house.”

Matt and I were on the outs,

Wait, when did that happen?

“I came to bring you home!” Barbara almost screamed at him. “Yeah, no,” he said snidely. “I can’t sleep in a bed that you’ve been fucking the TA from your biology lab in. Sorry.”

“I haven’t seen you in a year and three months!”

“I went home for Christmas last year to your house and you weren’t even there!”

but I always figured you’d be the one to screw around. Oh, that reminds me,” he muttered, bumping Pete on the arm. “You owe me money on that. I told you she’d be the one to cheat.”

“’Cause you guys are family.” She beamed at me over her shoulder. “You’re like brothers. You have to forgive your brother.”

LOL, lies

I saw Carson Cress bolting across the street, in traffic, dodging cars.

“Open… the door.” “Go.” I paused as long as he had. “To hell.”

People spoke of him like the Second Coming. They saw big things for him, a football career and then a political one. He could be—people were quoted as saying—“whatever he wanted.” Everyone loved him. But that would all change if he were bi.

“Come to my room with me. I’ll fuck you and you can feed me and we’ll live happily ever after.” “You’re straight, Shane,” I reminded him. “Yeah, but I like anal.”

At the moment, Ellie was his girlfriend, but it had almost reached the two-month mark when he began gasping for air, suddenly suffocating, and broke up with whoever he was with.

“Oh thank God,” he groaned, grabbing me, turning, and throwing me over his shoulder in a fireman carry. “I didn’t want to have to knock you out.” “You were not going to knock me—” “Oh, the hell I wasn’t,”

He had missed being with his family the year before because he had spent his holiday with the girlfriend he had abandoned me for. They had not raised him like that, and while they understood that in the future he would be spending holidays away from them when he fell in love for real, some girl who would come between him and me was not a good choice.

To have shared something amazing with someone special was one thing, but to trivialize the encounter with silence afterward––I didn’t even get a “Merry Christmas”—stripped all the magic away, leaving behind only a mistake in the heat of passion.

Football is done, Henry. You need to come to terms with no longer being famous in his reflected glory.”

“But your father—” “Doesn’t matter.” He sighed. “Mom’s the one with the money, and her prenup was scary, from what my grandfather––her father––told me before he passed away last year.”

Though, as she told me, he wasn’t getting anything of hers; the prenup prevented that.

“Sorry I came barging into your life and changed everything.” He was a steamroller, plain and simple.