Page 21 of Deceiving Grier

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m fine. It’s just my parents are traditional, and I’m their only son.” He shrugged again as if the whole thing was no big deal, but I could tell that wasn’t true.

“Have they come around since then?”

“Not really. My sexuality makes them uncomfortable, so they don’t talk about it. They pretend it doesn’t exist. Whenever they’re confronted with it, with me, they’re disappointed all over again.”

Christ! How could any parent, especially his own, be disappointed in Grier? It was mind-boggling to me. Grier was smart, hard-working, athletic and one of the few genuinely kind people I had ever met.

“Do your parents knowyou’regay?” Grier asked, glancing at me again.

I laughed. “Oh, hell yeah. I decided not to come out formerly, though. Instead, I thought it would be far more impactful to have my stepfather walk in on me making out with a friend from school. We were skipping class, and I didn’t think anyone would be home, so we were on the couch, pants and underwear down around our knees, rubbing off on each other when Carl walked in.”

“Holy shit!” Grier looked at me, expression a nearly comical mix of shock and horror. “If that had been my parents, they’d probably have dropped dead on the spot.”

“Admittedly, not one of my finer moments.”

“What did your parents do?”

“Carl is usually an asshole about everything—I’ve lost track of the number of times he’s thrown me out of the house—but weirdly, he wasn’t terrible about catching me with a guy. He yelled at me totake that shit into my room, but aside from that, he didn’t say much else. When my mom got him, she talked to me about being safe, but that was it.”

“Do you get along with your parents?”

“Sort of. I get along with my mom, for the most part. I wish she wouldn’t put up with Carl’s crap, but she has my brother and sister to think about. Honestly, I think they’re both miserable together, but neither one of them can afford to leave, so they’re just stuck together. It makes for delightful visits during the holidays.”

“I hate going home for the holidays,” Grier admitted. “I usually lie and tell my family I have to work or I have a game and can’t get away. Alistair hated going home too, and Jett’s family didn’t want him home, so we usually spent the holidays together. One year, Jett talked us into trying to make a traditional turkey dinner for Thanksgiving. Let’s just say it didn’t go well.”

I laughed. “Why am I not shocked?”

Grier smiled. “It was still a better holiday than any with my family.”

We were in our last year of school, and Grier planned to go back to run his family’s business. If he couldn’t stand going home for a few days or weeks, how in the hell would he handle living there for the rest of his life?

“When I moved here away from family and to a place where no one knew me, I finally thought I could just be me,” he said, pulling me from my thoughts. “For the first time in my life, I could just be myself and not worry about what my parents would think. But then, once I was here, everyone else seemed so far ahead of me. As if they all knew what they were doing, and I didn’t have a clue. The first time I tried to have sex with someone, it was a fucking disaster.”

Everything inside me turned cold and squeezed tight. If someone had done something to him he hadn’t been ready for, I was going to hunt them down.

“What happened?” I asked, forcing my voice to stay calm, even.

“We were out at The Dunes. I met this guy, and he was fuckinghot.” Grier chuckled, soft and humorless. “It was my first year here, and he was a couple of years ahead of me. I went back to his place, and we started making out on his couch. We were kissing, and I was jerking him off—myspecialty, after all.” He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, this guy eventually wants me to give him a blow job, and I didn’t necessarilynotwant to do it, but I’d never done it before. I panicked a bit and froze up. I didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t stop thinking, what if I did it wrong?”

While not all blow jobs were created equal—the joy of a non-functioning gag reflex could not be overstated, after all—there was no wrong way to give a blow job, provided one didn’t involve teeth. Someone should have told Grier, but this didn’t feel like the right time.

“I didn’t really want to stop. Just slow down a bit,” Grier said. “But he got pissed off, and he told me if he’d wanted a hand job, he could have stayed home and jerked himself off. Then he told me to go, so I did.” He stopped walking now that we were outside our house. He scrubbed both hands down his face. “Shit, it was the most humiliating experience I’ve ever had. I can’t believe I told you.”

“Does he still go to our school?” Because I was going to find him and punch the ever-loving shit out of him.

Grier shook his head. “No, he graduated later that same year. Thank god. Every time I saw him after that, I wished the floor would open, and I would disappear.”

“You know he was the asshole in that story, right? You didn’t do anything wrong, and you sure as shit have nothing to be embarrassed about. You decide the pace and what you’re comfortable doing, no one else.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ve been having sex since you were a teenager. I’m twenty-three. I should have had sex before now. Now, I’ve waited too long, and it’s weird and awkward that I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to fuck up again like I did before,” Grier said, while we climbed the steps to the porch, and he unlocked the front door.

“The thing is, college is ending soon, and I’ll have to go back to Wisconsin. My opportunity to be with someone and not worry that my family will find out will be gone. I’ll have squandered it because I wastooafraid.”

Did he plan to go back to his family and be celibate for the rest of his life and never have a relationship because his parents would be uncomfortable? “Do youwantto go back?”

He shook his head. “My dad’s sick. Chronic leukemia.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I told him, meaning it. His relationship with his father sounded complicated, but it still sucked.

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