Page 49 of Strictly Curious
“What?” Him telling me not to do it had me pulling it from my pocket and wishing I would have listened.
There were two posts where both Garrett and I had been tagged, one from Toby and one from Maisy. My heart sank. Our little bubble had burst. My chest grew tight while my phone dropped to the floor and clattered against the tile.
Where the hell had they gotten that picture?
Garrett
SpottedoutsideofPizzazz.Newport’s new LGTBQ friendly pizza joint also in support of incest?
The heading on Toby’s picture had me seeing red. The shot was clear as day. I had Tyler pressed into the side of the car and our lips were locked in a heated kiss. I had known kissing him like that in public had been a terrible idea, but we’d done it anyway.
What got me was that I hadn’t seen anyone that looked familiar. Newport wasn’t a small town, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t seen us while we were obviously preoccupied.
There was a second post, it was a reshare of Toby’s and the fact that it was Maisy that had reshared it made me feel even worse. I’d talked Tyler into opening up to her, hoping she would be a good person for him to talk to about what he was dealing with. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Can confirm that this is a real thing. Tyler Mason himself told me he was hooking up with his stepbrother.
The warning to stay off of his phone went unheard, or maybe Tyler didn’t care, but the sound of his phone hitting the kitchen floor let me know that he’d seen the whole thing. I was across the kitchen and crouching down in front of him, palming both sides of his down-turned face. His eyes were wide and quickly filled with tears.
“How—how could she?” He choked on the words as the tears spilled over.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think she would do that.”
He grabbed one of my wrists, pulled my hand away from his face, and looked away. His breaths were slow and staggered, like he was trying to not break down and start sobbing. I felt so fucking bad. This was all my fault and I should have never pushed him to talk to her.
Tyler’s phone started ringing, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to keep trying to comfort him, but I wanted to turn the damn thing off, too. I wanted to turn them all off so no one could touch us. We weren’t brothers by blood so for Toby to keep calling what we were doing as incest was wrong.
It started and stopped two more times, so whoever was trying to call, was really trying to get through. My phone started ringing as well, so when Tyler’s phone started going off again I reluctantly picked it up from the floor. The screen was cracked now from having been dropped, but it was impossible to miss that it was his dad that was calling. If his dad was calling, it meant they were where they had cell phone service again.
Shit, this was really bad.
With shaking fingers, I swiped to answer the call and brought the phone to my ear. “Hello?” My voice had never sounded so foreign to my own ears. I was actually terrified of my stepfather for the first time in my life. He’d always been so accepting of me since Mom and I came into his life, but I wondered if he’d just found out that I was fucking his son and he was going to disown the both of us over the phone.
“What the hell is going on over there?” He sounded angry, but not as angry as I’d anticipated. Maybe the disowning would wait until they got home.
“I’m not sure…” I didn’t get to finish the statement before the phone was obviously yanked away from him by my mother.
“Tyler, honey?” I took a deep breath because she didn’t know that I’d been the one to answer Ty’s phone.
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Oh, God. Garrett. What happened? We decided to come home because we were worried about Tyler after he got hurt. I opened up my social media app… and well…”
My heart hammered in my chest because this wasn’t how I’d wanted to come out to my parents that I was bi. Much less how I wanted them to find out there was something going on between me and Tyler. This was so wrong of Toby on so many levels. It was like some unwritten rule in the queer community that you didn’t out anyone, and Toby was blasting everyone’s business all over the internet.
“Can you explain what’s happening?” she finally asked when I didn’t immediately say anything. The blessing was that she didn’t sound angry. She didn’t even sound judgemental, which was a little surprising.
“I don’t know if I want to talk about this over the phone,” I said while looking over at Tyler who had pulled his feet up onto the chair. His face was buried in his knees and his shoulders shook. This was all a big fucking mess, and I’d dragged him into it.
I heard Mom sniffle and briefly wondered why she was getting emotional. Sure it was probably a big shock for her to find out that her sons were fucking around, but until that second she hadn’t sounded very upset. “Not a problem, Garrett. We’ll be home in an hour. But we need to talk about this. I love you, honey.”
“Love you too, Mom.” And I felt my throat close off at the words because, fuck, she wouldn’t have said it if things had changed because of it. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be the last time I would hear it from her.
When the call disconnected I powered down Tyler’s phone and set it on the table. Cautiously I touched his knee, and he jolted at the contact. His tear-streaked face looked up at me before he stood and left the kitchen without a word.
I stared into the space he’d vacated. My emotions warred with each other. The anger at the posts from Toby and Maisy were clouding my judgment, and I wanted to make the world burn. No one got to make Tyler feel less than or bad for exploring who he was and with who he wanted to explore himself with. And no one got to out him but himself. Even if I’d partially blown that myself. It hadn’t been on the scale that Toby and Maisy had. Maisy, who was supposed to have been his friend. Who the hell could we trust?
The sound of his door slamming upstairs snapped me out of my thoughts once more. I sprang to my feet, ignoring the continued notifications going off on my phone. I would deal with that mess later. I had to prepare Tyler to talk to our parents.
