Page 71 of Catch Me
He looked at me over the tablet. I leaned forward and tapped a button to bring up the next one, which was him on the couch while we watched a movie.
“I like this one,” I said.
“Why this one out of all of them?”
“It’s from the side, so I can’t really see your eyes.”
“Those elusive fuckers. You’re gonna end up resenting them.”
“No, they’re really nice.”
It was hard to tell since he brought the glass to his lips, but I thought he smiled. I poured more vodka into my cup to distract myself. His presence was impossible to ignore. It was worse that I didn’t want to. When I returned my attention to him, he was already looking at me.
“If I ask you a question, will you answer it honestly?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“What made you believe gay people are wrong?”
My eyes widened, and it took me a second to reorient myself. “I don’t believe that.”
“But you don’tagreewith something about us.”
“Um...” My gaze moved to the side as I tried to think of a response.
“Nevermind. I shouldn’t have asked. It violates the boundaries I set.”
“I changed my mind,” I said quickly, afraid he’d walk away from me.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that gay people aren’t wrong. I was.”
He leaned his hip against the cabinet as he drained the rest of his vodka. “Okay, Roman. I’m intrigued. What happened in the past month to make your worldview shift so majorly?”
You. That wasn’t entirely true. It had started a while ago, probably in my second year at the art institute. Those were small things, though. A slight shift in perception here, a stray thought there. Within the span of less than two months, I’d done more than in the past two years.
“I don’t want to be like my dad,” I said.
“Is he the reason you thought those things?”
“Sort of.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because I know what that’s like. My dad didn’t accept me for a while.”
“It’s nothing like that.” I took a step away from him. It would’ve been better to just stay in the room. Why the hell did he want to have a heart-to-heart?
He put his hands on my biceps. “Don’t do that. You decide what to do with your anger, remember?”
I could’ve shaken him off, but I didn’t. “I’m not angry.”
“The first step is admitting you have a problem,” he joked, then smiled apologetically. “Look, I wasn’t trying to imply that it was the same. I was just trying to relate.”
“Okay.”
