Page 17 of Salvaged Heart
I hummed in acknowledgment.
“We can take this slow, baby steps. Every day, you tell me three things about you, and in return, I will tell you three things about me.”
“Seems simple enough.”
“Yeah, but we’ve got to have rules.”
“Rules?”
“Rules. Otherwise, I know you’ll feed me surface-level bullshit, and being friends with someone goes deeper than that.”
That was what I was afraid of.
“I’ll allow you two out of the three things to be throw-away stuff. The basics that everyone knows or things that are not hard for you to offer up. But one thing a day has to be something of substance, some truth only for me.”
“You got a lot of secrets, Beckham?”
The smile he shot my way was blinding. “Nah, I’m an open book. But I get the impression you do.”
The morning passed slowly,and by the time we broke for lunch, my arms ached from holding the paintbrush over my head for the majority of the day. I know Beckham’s arms had to burn from moving the roller back and forth, but he had covered the walls quickly and then began cutting in along the baseboards while I finished the tedious task of doing the same along the ceiling. My thighs cramped from constantly climbing down the ladder to shuffle it along a few steps before hiking back up to continue work.
My stomach growled. I’d grown accustomed to three balanced meals a day, mostly thanks to Beckham’s weird insistence on me eating. Something that, before returning to Arbor Ct. this summer, I had not been. Back in Atlanta, it was lucky if I managed one meal a day, and usually, it was fast food or dry cereal shoveled directly out of the box. I wasn’t starving myself intentionally, but the little money I was making from odd jobs here and there I funneled directly into gas for my bike and, after that, my addictions, plural.
“I am allergic to coconut,” I offered up between bites of my turkey and Swiss sandwich. “And my favorite color is green. But not standard Crayola twelve-pack green, more of an evergreen.”
Beckham’s eyes lit up at my unprompted openness.
I forged on, pushing the words out of my mouth before I could second-guess them. “And…I am…gay.” I had thought about the deeper fact I might give him since he’d mentioned it this morning.
So many of my singular truths connected to this one key piece of information about myself. It seemed the logical place to start. Also, the rational part of me, small as it might be, knew that getting this out of the way early would hurt less if that information were a deal-breaker for him. I had known this about myself since I was thirteen and had long come to terms with it. I knew who I was, and I was not ashamed of it, but that didn’t take the sting out of being rejected because of it. Better tear the bandaid off now while I was still warming up to the idea of a friendship than waiting until I was fully invested and having the possibility torn away from me. “Hopefully, that’s not an issue?”
Beckham locked eyes with me, narrowing them slightly. “Why would it be?”
I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling hot under the collar due to his attention. “It has been in the past, for other people.”
He nodded understandingly. “It’s not an issue for me.” Another few torturous beats of silence. “Thank you for trusting me with that part of yourself.”
“It’s not a secret. I have been out of the closet a long time.”
“No, I know.” He took a large bite of his sandwich, chewing it slowly before swallowing it in one go. “But I have a friend who’s gay. She told me coming out isn’t a one-time thing. Once you make that decision, you continue making it your entire life. Every time you get a new friend, boss, coworker, or crush, you have to decide to reveal that part of yourself again, and every time, you leave yourself open to rejection. That’s got to be hard.”
I hadn’t thought about it like that, but it was true. “Well, thank you for being cool with it. Still friends?”
“That’s not something you need to thank me for. But you’re welcome anyway, and yes, we are still friends.”
We moved next to the primary bedroom and set about taking apart the massive amount of furniture it was littered with. Last week, a man who bore a striking resemblance to Colonel Sanders came from a local antique consignment store to appraise many of the larger items in the home. He’d determined that several of them could fetch a hefty price tag. He had a warehouse not far from here that was set up as a showroom for wealthy buyers to view pieces in person, and told us if we could take the items apart without damaging them, he would swing by with a box truck to haul them away.
“Let’s start with the bed. Once it’s out of here, it will give us more space.”
We set to work, me holding bits and pieces at Beckham’s direction while he undid bolts and screws. Then, we carried the items downstairs to stack by the large front doors in the grand foyer. Man, it was heavy. Everything in that room was made of solid wood. Luckily, Beckham was reasonably strong, as I was not bringing much to the table in that department.
“It’s your turn.” I reminded him after a few hours of idle chitchat.
“It is.” He pretended to think hard about his facts, tapping his chin like a stage actor in a pantomime. “I hate avocado. My favorite animal is a Red Panda. And, when I injured my shoulder in May and was told I’d never play ball again, I think I was relieved.”
I considered this for a moment. “Because then you didn’t need to worry about what would happen if you weren’t drafted?” It was the only explanation I could think of for why he might feel relief over being stripped of his dream. To me, it would be better to have something you loved taken from you unfairly than to be told you weren’t good enough to have it to begin with.
“No, I don’t think that’s why. At least, I think…Well, I think I was relieved I wouldn’t risk being a letdown.”
