Page 42 of For the Love of the Broken Man

“This is nice,” Jase had told his mother when she pulled into the driveway of her house at Ft. Sill after she’d picked him up from the airport in Lawton.

“It seems smaller than Ft. Bliss, but there are actually gay and lesbian… Um, how’s things been with you?” They got out of the car and walked up to the small brick house on yet another Army base where Jase didn’t want to be.

He thought about telling her how his heart had been torn apart and how he’d been humiliated beyond compare in a few short months. Should he tell her how he’d sat one night with a razor blade in his hands and considered ending the pain? He didn’t believe he was worth anything to anyone—not his father, not her, and especially not Danny Johnson.

Jase finally decided if he did himself in, nobody would even care which pissed him off so much, he tossed the blade in the trash, dried his tears, and vowed to never look back.

“Yeah, well, it’s nice. What do you want, Mom? You know he’s never going to approve of having a queer son, so this is for what?” Jase was trying to get to the bottom of her request for him to visit.

She took a deep breath and looked into his eyes with big tears of her own. “This is for me, Jason. I love your father, but I believe he’s wrong in his homophobia. I’ve been going to meetings with a group on base. It’s called PFLAG. If your father knew, he’d be upset, but I needed to understand, and since they repealed DADT, the Army is more accepting of LGBTQ folks. Unfortunately, older people like Dad have a hard time with it,” she explained.

Jase was taken aback for a minute, but the fact she was doing it behind James’ back told him the real story. When the saber-tooth tiger’s away, the mouse will play. He didn’t want to fuck up his mother’s life, so he simply nodded.

“Okay, Mom. Anyway, I’m here. What’s there to do in Oklahoma?” he asked. She proceeded to show him around the new base and even introduced him to some of the other women on base who had families with soldiers deployed. Some of the kids were pretty great and reminded him too much of a little girl with a crooked ponytail who he was missing very much.

The day he was to return to Wonderland, his mother drove him to the airport and parked in a departure lane with a look of worry on her face. “I have something for you, Jason. I love you so much, and I wish things were different, but we have to play the hand we’re dealt, I suppose. Anyway, after Grandma and Grandpa Cooper died, they left me a little bit of money your father doesn’t know about. I want you to have this.” She handed him a large yellow check. He looked at it to see it was a cashier’s check for fifty thousand dollars with his name typed on it. He was in shock.

“Mom, they had a little piece of shit farm…”

“No! I know it didn’t look like much, but they lived on a little patch of land with more acreage around it than even I knew, and it sold for a tidy sum when Grandma passed. I had the lawyer put it in a trust for me so your father would never know about it, and I contacted the attorney after we moved to have him dissolve the trust and send me the remainder after all expenses were paid. I want you to go to college, Jase. You have the gift of intellect and it shouldn’t go to waste. Use this to fill in for the money your dad refused to help you find, okay? Please?” she begged him.

When he got on the plane to go home, he cried because he felt like he was stealing from his mother, but he’d always wanted to go to college. The money she’d given him would be enough if he was careful and took advantage of work-study programs, grants, and scholarships. It just might work.

His bedroom door opened, so he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. “Shit sakes. Get your lazy ass up,” his roommate ordered as she bounced her foot on his bed in the closet he called a bedroom of their three-bedroom apartment.

Brittany leased the place, having lived in the dorms and hating it her freshman year. He’d met her at a coffee shop near the college where he was applying for a job, and she’d been a lifesaver for Jase when he first hit the campus and became dismayed with his freshman roommate, a total homophobe.

Brit’s abrasive personality had been trying over the three years he’d been enrolled at Georgia Tech—Georgia Institute of Technology—but they’d come to appreciate each other over little things.

Jase liked to get up early in the morning to review notes before class, and he made their coffee. Brit wasn’t a morning person at all, and when she trudged into the kitchen without saying a word, he handed her a full cup without the woman even having to open her eyes.

Grocery shopping and cooking was another thing Jase enjoyed doing. Brittany, in return, would leave money on the table with a note of thanks.

Jase was afraid of spiders, and in the old place where they lived, there were a lot of them. Brittany had no such phobia and would delight in killing them with a grand curtsy when she walked out of his bathroom after she flushed them. The two of them were nearly a match made in heaven aside for the fact she was a lesbian, and he was a gay man.

Atlanta, Georgia, had become his home for the last three years after the devastation that rocked his soul when Danny dropped him like a bad habit. As a result, Jase had fast-tracked his education because he had limited funds and a goal to get through school and still have some money left to be able to eat and maybe have first and last months’ rent for an apartment somewhere.

Jase had already accepted a job in Rockville, Maryland, for a cybersecurity firm that contracted with the Securities Exchange Commission in Washington, DC. The company had corporate housing available until he found a place of his own, and the salary was good. He could work from anywhere, but Maryland seemed like as good a place as any to settle since he had no real ties to anyone or any place.

“You’re a cunt,” he told the woman shaking his bed, hearing her loud cackle which always made his blood curdle.

“I let your little playmate out. God, you pick twinks afraid of their own shadows,” Brit complained. It was then Jase remembered picking up a sophomore from a bar near campus and bringing him home. After the blow job the kid had given him, Jase passed out and didn’t even remember the guy’s name. He felt bad for about a minute, but it passed.

“I’m not a dyke. Everybody’s not a raging lunatic like you. I like my men submissive,” he explained as he rose from the bed, not bothering to cover up his semi-hard cock.

“Oh, gross!”Brittany groaned before she turned away.

“This is a no-pussy zone, and you know it, Brit. Did you turn on the coffee pot?” Jase strutted across the small room to the communal bathroom he shared with Brittany and their other roommate, Bryan, “with a Y you see,” as he’d told them.

It had seemed important to the man when he’d pointed it out, so they began referring to him asY, kind of likeQfrom the Bond films they watched on movie nights.

“Ydidn’t come home. You don’t think he’s fallen into any mischief, do you? He’s supposed to be here through next term, and he has a lot of shit in his room,” Brit complained, which was a constant in Jase’s mind.

Brittany was in a perpetual state of hatred for everyone around her whether they deserved it or not, as far as Jason was concerned. She’d toughened him up as well, and she’d made him attend yoga classes with her over the time they’d shared the house. He’d become very nimble over the years, and while it should have been a plus on his dating resume, he didn’t date. Thus, no one had experienced his agility.

Jason came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist in deference to Brit’s tender sensibilities when it came to the male form. “I’d guess he got laid. I wouldn’t send a search party just yet. So, how long will you give me to move out? I mean, I’m sure this closet will go for top dollar while you’re in grad school,” he taunted, hoping to piss her off. He loved nothing more than arguing with his landlady.

She laughed. “God if you had tits and a pussy, we’d be a match made in heaven. You get as long as you need, Sprout. Pack this crap up, and I’ll make sure it gets sent to your new address as soon as you give it to me. I reserve the right to come visit, by the way.” Her declaration led him to believe something he’d always known. Brittany didn’t hate him as she often claimed. It gave him some comfort.

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