Page 12 of Daddy's Muse
But not yet.
Not until he was ready.
For now, I’d simply begin building the life he deserved—starting with the slow dismantling of the things that hurt him. And maybe, just maybe, he’d come to understand that some people weren’t here to use him or break him.
Some of us were made tokeephim.
5
Colby
Hours earlier, I’d made the mistake of accepting a bag of potato chips from Bryan. In hindsight, I should’ve known he’d only offer me something with the expectation of getting something from me in return.
I was already in a hurry to make it to my tutoring session, and I was hungry, and he’d offered the chips so nonchalantly that I didn’t hesitate to accept them.
I berated myself in my head as I trudged across campus to the library.
Bryan wanted me to write an essay for one of his courses. He wanted me to help him cheat knowingly. Something like that could result in my expulsion from school or, at the very least, the cancellation of my scholarship, which would then make it impossible for me to continue my studies.
He said it was theleastI could do to repay him. I’d told him no, and hoping to avoid a fight, ran out of our room with the excuse that I had to be on time for tutoring. Instead of staying in our room like I’d assumed he would do, he followed me down five flights of stairs and out of the dorm building.
He’d said some mean stuff that I was trying not to think about. I was already dreading going back to our room.
My chest felt too tight underneath my skin. My throat burned from holding back my emotions.
I thought that going to college would be the start of my fun adult life. I thought that I could be out and proud and maybe even make other friends in the community.
I thought it’d be different this time around.
Why couldn’t it be different?
The high school in my grandparents’ small town had just over a hundred students. Many of those students never made it to graduation. There were only twenty-one of us in our graduating class.
I actually had a few friends throughout middle school, but that all changed when I was apparently a little too obvious about my crush on the boy next door. The foothills and hollers of rural West Virginia weren’t the most accepting places.
I was fifteen when the first rumor started.
It didn’t even take twenty-four hours for the entire school to know. I remember walking into second period and every single head turning toward me like I’d grown horns. Some of them snickered. Others just stared like I’d come in dragging something diseased behind me.
I think I could’ve handled it better if they were only laughing at me for being gay. But it wasn’t just that. My crush had told people that I had tried to suck his dick. I will never forget the look on his face when I tried to ask him to tell the truth, to telleveryone that I never tried anything, that I didn’t even say that I liked him.
He looked at me like I was disgusting. He refused to speak to me. The boy who’d been so nice to me when I had first moved into my grandparents’ house, the boy who’d brought me into his friend group since I was new and didn’t have anyone to hang out with, he was gone. And in his place was this teenager who saw me as no better than trash.
After that, everything shifted. My friends stopped sitting with me at lunch. I started getting shoved into lockers when no teachers were around. Once, someone scrawled a slur on the bathroom mirror in soap, and I stood there staring at it, dripping wet from gym class, knowing they meantme.
But I still thought college would be different.
It was supposed to be my reset. A fresh start. New city, new faces, new chances. I chose the state university because it was just far enough from home to feel like an escape, but still close enough that if my grandparents needed me, I could be there within a few hours. And I’d been so hopeful—stupidlyhopeful—that a bigger place would mean more room to breathe. More chances.
I still remember how excited I was when I moved in. Holding onto hopes that my roommate could be my best friend, my study buddy, someone I could bond with.
But then I walked in and met Bryan.
He was nice-ish at first. Loud, sure, and kind of gross, but I thought maybe that was just normal college guy behavior. He had friends who came by a lot, too. Equally loud, messy guys who reeked of weed and beer and always made themselves comfortable in what was supposed to be my place to relax, my safe space. They laughed when I played indie music or brought back a novel from the library. They made jokes I couldn’t repeat, and I learned early just to keep my head down and not react.
Then came the slurs. The “fag” slipped under their breath when I folded my laundry too neatly. The mock limp wrist. The way they looked at me when I came back wearing my pride pin that I’d finally gotten the courage to buy. Like I was something they’d stepped in. Needless to say, I didn’t wear my pin again.
Bryan always brushed it off, as if he and his friends were just joking around with me. He would always tell me I was too sensitive and needed to loosen up.
