After School Activities (24 page)

driveway and Adam stepped back inside. We were finally alone.

The mask of strength was gone. Adam looked exhausted. He

collapsed, eyes closed, onto the couch across from me.

I stood up and looked around, half expecting Pete to show up, but we

were truly alone. I sat at the opposite end of the couch. I listened hard and heard only the sound of Adam’s breathing. I scooted over until I was

sitting next to him. Adam’s head dropped on my shoulder. His breathing

deepened. I began to fret that he had fallen asleep, that Pete would barge

in any second.

Adam’s fingers brushed mine. I looked down at him, but he still

gave no sign that he was anything but asleep. I struggled to be half as

relaxed.

“Aren’t you afraid Pete will see us?” I asked softly.

Adam’s eyes snapped open, and he lifted his head. “Do you see Pete

anywhere?” He stood up, crossed the room, and grabbed a picture frame

off the bookshelf. I’d looked at that picture earlier in the day. It was a

picture of Adam and Pete, when Adam was around ten years old, sitting

on their mom’s lap.

“Adam?” I asked. “What is it?”

He didn’t look up from the picture. “Will you stay tonight? I don’t

want to be alone.”

Immediately, my stomach clenched.
Say no, oh God, say no
, said the

part of me still hurting from his betrayal.
He’s only looking for some life-143

Dirk Hunter

affirming comfort sex.
It had a point. “Of course,” I said instead. The look of relief on his face was immediate.

Fuck
, I thought,
I hope I don’t regret this.

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After School Activities

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

HE LED me upstairs to his room. He started changing out of his nice suit. I

didn’t quite feel comfortable with watching, so I occupied myself with

exploring his room. It was extraordinarily clean. Not even a few

abandoned pieces of clothing on the floor. His suit immediately went on

hangers, and his used undershirt into a small hamper hidden in his closet.

It seemed almost clinical.

The walls were a very plain off-white with no posters anywhere. The

furniture was unremarkable, the bedding plain. The desk was the only

place in the room that felt at all lived-in, with its scattered homework

assignments and textbooks. His trophies were lined on the back of the

desk, and also along the windowsill. There were over a dozen of them,

across several different sports and ages. They must have represented his

entire life’s achievements, at least those he wanted to remember and

display. But what caught my eye most, perhaps because it was the only

color in the room, outside of the burnished gold of the trophies, was a

stained glass pendant, about the size of a small cell phone, hanging by a

ribbon from one of the trophies on the windowsill. It was beautiful, deep

blues, brilliant reds and greens forming no particular pattern, becoming

instead a sort of calming chaos. From the way it was hanging, I could tell

that, had it been day, it would have caught the light perfectly from the

window.

“What’s this?” I asked, reaching out to take hold of the pendant.

Adam came up behind me, dressed now in the plain T-shirt and

sweatpants I was used to. “It was for you. I was going to give it to you for

Christmas, but I never got the chance.” I was speechless. But even if I

hadn’t been, Adam didn’t give me the opportunity to respond. “Here, you

can wear these,” he said, handing me a neatly folded pair of sweatpants, a

T-shirt, and even a clothes hanger for the suit I was wearing.

I took them from him. “Thanks. I’ll just—” But he had already

stepped out of the room. I stared at the shut door for a second after he left.

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Had he left to give me privacy? Or was there something else going on?

Either way, I was going to take advantage of it to change. Sure, Adam had

seen me naked, but that was
before
. I was grateful for the privacy.

Adam’s clothes were pretty baggy on me. Luckily the sweatpants

had a drawstring, or I’d have had to hold them up with one hand

throughout the night. I finished changing, hung my suit neatly on the

clothes hanger I’d been given, but Adam still hadn’t returned. So I took

the opportunity to send my parents a text.

I won’t be home tonight.

I hesitated sending it. How honest should I be?

Spending the night at Kai’s.

My mom responded almost immediately.
Uh-huh. Sure you are.

Dad’s reply came right after.
Does this mean I’m not gonna have to

make cookies every night from now on? ’Cause your mom’s gonna be

disappointed.

I rolled my eyes and didn’t respond.

The door opened. “I found a toothbrush for you, if you want.” Adam

tossed me an unopened toothbrush.

“Thanks,” I said and followed him to the bathroom.

We brushed our teeth, side by side and in silence. I watched Adam in

the mirror, gave him sidelong glances, but he kept his eyes firmly fixed on

the sink. I started to get annoyed. Why was I even here? I was being

ignored so thoroughly, it was almost as if I weren’t. We brushed in

silence, finished in silence, walked back to Adam’s room in silence. Adam

lay down on his bed—you guessed it—in silence. He rolled over, putting

his back to me.

Well, here it comes
, I thought, looking down at him in the darkness.

The “comforting.”
I wasn’t sure I was okay with this. I was still upset with him. It was one thing to put that aside, for now, but being a grief-fuck was

quite another.
Come on, Dylan, his mom just died. He needs you to be

there for him.
Yeah, but I wasn’t planning on being quite as “there” as this.
What would you regret more, a quick comfort fuck or abandoning

someone you care about, whether you want to admit it or not, to deal with
his grief alone?

Fuck.

So I lay down too, crawled under the covers, and tried to force my

trepidation aside.

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After School Activities

Adam immediately rolled toward me, put his arm around my waist

and his head on my chest.
Okay, not what I was expecting.
Awkwardly, I placed my arm on his back, gave him a little pat. After a minute, I felt a

wetness seep through my shirt.

He’s crying
, I realized. Not sobbing—he was making no noise, only

shedding silent tears. Weeping, I guess, would be the word to use here. I

had never seen anyone weep before. When Kai’s dad died, he had sobbed

for days. Granted, that was Kai, and we were twelve, but Adam wasn’t

sobbing. I think I assumed he was… not okay, obviously but… I don’t

really know. Suddenly, I realized Adam hadn’t been ignoring me before.

He’d just been sad and probably felt like he couldn’t let it out until we

were alone. In the dark. That’s probably also why he avoided me all day,

because he didn’t want his composure to slip. I was right that he needed

comforting, but I didn’t expect it to be, well, literal comforting. Holy fuck, I’m an idiot.

I didn’t say anything. I just brushed his hair with my fingers until we

fell asleep.

I WOKE up with an intense thirst. The clock on Adam’s bedside table read

1:00 a.m. in harsh red light. Sometime while we slept, Adam had rolled

off me, and now he lay at the far side of the bed. I slipped out of bed,

careful not to wake him up, and made my way downstairs to the kitchen to

grab a drink of water.

The house was still. I self-consciously glanced at the hallway leading

to the stairs to the basement, where I knew Pete’s bedroom was. It was

silent, but I could see the faint glow of a light left on. I tried my best to locate a glass in silence, but was continually thwarted by the kitchen’s

propensity for noises. Stepped on the wrong part of the floor, creak.

Opened a cupboard too quickly, squeak. Opened a cupboard too slowly,

groan. I half expected the refrigerator to start singing, just to spite me.

Eventually I found a cup—a mug, but at that point I wasn’t about to be

picky—and filled it with water. Noisy faucets. Surprise, surprise.

“Who the fuck are you?” I heard slurred behind me.

I turned around. Looming in the doorway, silhouetted by the light

from the hall, was Pete. He still wore his ill-fitting suit, though it was

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unbuttoned and extremely wrinkled. Even across the room, I could smell

the alcohol on him. He was enormous, intimidating, and radiating menace.

With as much dignity as I could muster, I cowered. “I’m Adam’s

friend.”

Pete stepped closer. “You’re that faggot, aren’t you?”

He seemed to expect some response. “Um….”

“What the fuck are you doing here, faggot?”

He was getting really close. “Adam asked me to stay,” I said.

“You’re disgusting,” he continued, not seeming to have heard me.

“You’re trying to convert him, aren’t you? Exploiting his grief so you can

have your way with him.”

“What? No, it’s not like that at all,” I said. Pete snarled and shoved

me, hard. My back hit the pantry with a loud thud. Pain shot up my spine,

and I collapsed to the floor. Pete stared down at me, hands balled into

fists. “I won’t let you take advantage of him,” he shouted.

I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t stop staring at his fist as he

raised it to strike.

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After School Activities

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

IN AN instant, Adam was there. He grabbed Pete’s arm.

“You will not touch him.” Adam didn’t yell, or even sound

particularly angry. Instead, his voice was soft and almost dangerous. “It’s

one thing to hit me. I’m your little brother. I’m supposed to get beat up

every now and again. That’s all well and good. But I will not stand by and

watch you hurt the guy I love—”

Wut.

“—because you are too big of a coward to deal with what you’re

feeling. Just like Dad. Well, I can act like Dad too. If you so much as look

at him wrong again, I’ll leave. And I’ll never come back.” With that, he

pushed Pete’s arm away. He didn’t use all that much force, but in Pete’s

inebriated state, it was enough to send him stumbling and land flat on his

ass. Pete stared up at his brother, mouth moving wordlessly as his booze-

addled mind was reeling for purchase. In that instant, I finally saw him as

he really was. He wasn’t this aggressive older brother to be feared, a

tyrant, pillar of imposing strength. He was just a person—a kid, really—

already developing a beer belly from drinking, probably by himself more

often than not, hair thinning way too early. One can only hope that isn’t in

Adam’s future, but I digress. A guy whose mom had just died and who

was trying desperately to be the adult he suddenly needed to be, but

without any example other than a drunk, sometimes abusive father who

ran away. A guy who was too weak to do any better. Though, in his

situation, it’s hard to believe that very many people would. In that

moment, I pitied him.

Ha, that’s a lie. I mean, I’m awesome and smarter than, like,

everyone else, but not even I’m that perceptive on the fly. It was actually

about three days later while telling this story to Kai that I made this

realization.

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In reality, and this seriously is the last time I’ll admit this, as I lay on

the floor (okay, cowered, really. Classy, I know), all I could do was look

up at Adam standing protectively over me, hands balled into fists, his

broad, muscled shoulders tensed with anger—to be honest, like, 95

percent of my memories of this moment are Adam-muscle-related—and

swoon. A mini, I’m-already-on-the-floor-type swoon, but a swoon

nonetheless. In my imagination, my suddenly adrenaline- and pain-

enhanced imagination, he was suffused with a halo of righteous wrath, an

aura of hero that seemed plucked straight from a fairy tale. I knew the

whole damsel-in-distress thing was really not a good look, but that was

where I was at. It didn’t help matters when a second later he turned and

scooped me up in his arms and carried me upstairs. The only thing that

could have cemented my damsel status any further was if I were being

carried from a tower or some shit. It was magical. It made my stomach

tingle in that “someone fulfilled my secret wish and I won’t ever even

have to admit I liked it” kind of way.

But for the sake of my ego, let’s pretend I picked myself up, told

Adam that Pete wasn’t worth it—or maybe something compassionate

instead—and walked upstairs myself in a dignified, manly manner,

because I am the hero of this story. Definitely not the damsel. If anyone

was the damsel, it was… well, not Adam, certainly. Far too many muscles

there. But someone else, someone not me. Kai, probably.

Heh. Yeah, it was definitely Kai.

Where was I?

Oh yes. Back in Adam’s room, in his bed—I was
not
placed there by

Adam’s big, strong arms, how dare you even think it? I walked,

remember?—I expected Adam to pace back and forth, quivering with

pent-up energy, or something, especially after how he had acted