Page 28 of Breaking You Open

Louis

On Monday, I’m offwork for once, and I spend the evening tinkering with my vintage Harley Davidson while I let Sparrow use the TV. He seems fascinated with it, switching between all kinds of different channels and staring incessantly at the screen. When a nature documentary comes on, he slides off the couch to sit on the carpet right in front of it.

“Didn’t have a TV back home?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer right away, instead too fascinated by the weird dance of some kind of bird on the screen, narrated by a quirky, calm male voice.

“Sparrow?”

He shakes out of his trance but doesn’t rip his gaze from the screen. “Uh, Madame had one in her room, but she wouldn’t let us watch. Aaron and I used to sneak inside when she was gone at work, and he’d let me—” He stops talking, suddenly shy, as if he said too much.

“So you and Aaron lived together?” I ask with a weird sense of unease.

“We were foster brothers,” Sparrow says, voice so low I can barely hear it over the chirping of birds.

I sigh, wipe my hands off with a rag, and grab the remote control from his hands.

“But…you said I could watch!” he whines.

“Come here.” I sit on the couch and pat the seat beside me.

Sparrow hesitates, a sullen pout to his lips as he crawls off the floor and comes to sit where I indicated, feet planted on the seat and arms wrapped around his legs.

“Sit up straight,” I say, voice firm. Sparrow obeys, but his hesitation shows when I put two knuckles under his chin to make him meet my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

Maybe I shouldn’t care so much about this tantrum of his, but he’s piqued my curiosity in more ways than one, and I’m losing the battle of trying to convince myself I don’t give a shit about him. He’s hurt, I can tell that much, and part of me doesn’t want him to feel like he’s unwanted. That Lilith girl said he’s been through enough, and I’m beginning to feel like she’s right.

“You don’t think it’s weird?” Sparrow asks finally, and when his eyes meet mine, they’re glazed over with tears. “That Aaron and I were foster brothers, and at the same time, we were…”

“How old were you,” I ask, “when you got together?”

“I was fourteen, and he was sixteen.”

I grimace. My uneasy feeling grows stronger with every passing second and every fleeting look of Sparrow as he winds his hands into the sleeves of his sweater. He looks so cute yet so broken.

“How did it happen?” I ask.

“Happen?”

“How did you two get together?”

“Oh,” he says, a flush rising to his cheeks. “He liked me, and I liked him, and…we started sleeping together.”

“Sleeping together as in…?”

“Having sex.”

“Fourteen is quite young for that,” I grumble, bringing a hand up to scratch my beard. Sparrow follows the motion of my hand. He seems quite fixated on it, the same way he was fixated on the TV just now. He’s…passionate. Attentive. And way, way too emotional. “Did you have sex, or did he have sex with you?”

He looks up at me, confusion in his big blue eyes. “What’s the difference?”

I scratch an itch on my jaw, too taken aback by his answer to muster a reply.

“How old wereyouthe first time, then?” Sparrow asks.

“Does it matter?”

“Well, since you say I was young, I want to know what’s more common. I don’t know these things.”

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