As I sat in the living room of our house contemplating everything which had transpired that afternoon, I was in my own world.  I turned on the TV and watched Star Trek: Voyager on Spike, but even that couldn’t distract me sufficiently from my thoughts.

Mom and Brand came into the house about 3:30.  Mom went upstairs to find Dad.  Brand came over to the couch and sat beside me.  At four, Carter came into the house looking for Justin.  Robbie was with him.  The two of them went into Justin’s bedroom for a little while, obviously to talk about what had happened.

At four-thirty, Carter emerged, obviously having cried for the past few minutes.  Robbie also looked distraught, as if his world had come crashing down on top of him.  I felt for the kid, but I didn’t say anything to him.  I mean, how un-cool is it to be comforted by your English teacher? 

At five, Mom emerged from the office.  She and Brand went about preparing dinner for the whole family.  For some reason, Brand had become her helper of choice when preparing dinner.  Evidently he followed directions better than any of Olga’s natural born children.

I stayed in the living room.  I couldn’t help but think.  Thinking was all I could do.  I thought about my own attack.  I thought what Justin had done.  I thought about Brand, as well as my mother, both of whom seemed to be in love with me in their own distinctive ways.  I thought about Dad, Parker, Laura, and the girls.  I thought about my grandparents.  I thought about my cousins, and their children.  I thought about Kyle.  I thought about his marriage to Gina.  I thought about my students, both at Oneonta and the university.  I thought about my friends, Carmen, Matt, et al.  There was nothing that was free from my mind.

Parker and Laura came in with the girls at around six.  As far as I knew, they knew nothing about what had transpired that day; they were blissfully unaware anything was wrong.  The girls all climbed about and played with me.  Laura went to the kitchen to hang out with Mom; Parker went upstairs to hang out with Dad.

I didn’t realize so much time had passed until we were all called to dinner.  I held Chloe with one hand Heidi took the other, almost holding on for dear life.

“Go get your brother,” Mom instructed me as she walked into the living room and called for Parker and Dad to come from the office.

“Okay,” I said as I walked back through the living room to get Justin.  Heidi stayed with her Mom, while Chloe remained in my arms.

As we walked in, we found Justin lying on his bed, half in a trance, half crying.

“Justy!” Chloe exclaimed as I set her down and she ran to his bed, dodging piles of smelly clothes that lay everywhere.

“Hey, Chloita,” he said somberly.

“Mom said to get you for dinner,” I responded.

“Okay,” he said as he climbed out of bed, picking Chloe up as he stood.

Parker tried to joke with Justin, but Justin didn’t respond with his usual banter.  Dad and Justin were as cold as ice to each other when we finally sat to eat.  Mom and Brand talked to one another about random stuff.  Laura joined their conversation.  Heidi tried to make everyone laugh with her own little brand of humor that was as unique as her ethnic background.

“Laura,” Dad started after a second, bringing the whole table to silence.

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow, you’ll need to get Justin’s information.  He’s gonna start working in the shop.”

“Okay?” Laura replied inquiringly, looking at everyone.  Justin was almost distraught.  He played with his food a little bit, unable to take another bite.

“He’s got some shit he’s got to pay me back for,” Dad commented.

“So, Olga...” Brand said as he looked around the table, at all the sobriety.  “What should I do about that student that I was asking you about earlier?”

“I think you should call his parents.  Parents at Oneonta are usually pretty good about keeping their kids in line.”

“Okay…” Brand stated.

“Why is Justin going to work in the shop?” Laura asked.

“He’s got a debt to repay,” Dad answered as he took a bite of the potatoes that Mom and Brand had prepared.  Justin sighed and put his fork onto the plate, loudly.  “What?” Dad asked, glaring at Justin.  “You don’t think you should have to pay me back for that shit?”

“Yeah…” Justin said.

“Dad,” I chimed in.  “What if…”

“No, Ryan,” Justin inserted as we sat there.

“What?” Dad asked.

“Nothing,” Justin answered, his voice and tone filled with teenage angst.

“What?!” Dad insisted.

“Dad,” I started, “what if Justin did…”

“RYAN!  NO!” Justin insisted, staring at me.

“Justin!  Shut up!” Dad said as he pointed his fork at my youngest brother.  Justin pushed himself away from the table, threw his napkin on his plate and walked away.

“JUSTIN ERNESTO COLLINS!” Dad yelled as he stood and followed Justin back into his room.

The yelling was about to start again.  I needed to be in there, though, because I’d made Justin a promise that I would defend him.  I followed my father into Justin’s room.  Dad started raising his voice at Justin again.  I’d never seen my Dad as he was right then; Justin was just as mad.  Justin wouldn’t open his mouth, though, and just say why he’d beat the shit out of that kid.

“DAD!” I yelled, louder than both of them together.  “FUCKING STOP YELLING AT HIM!”  Dad looked at me with a gaze that I hadn’t seen in a very, very long time—since I was a teenager like Justin.  “Ask Justin why he did this.”

“Why?” Dad asked as he turned back to my brother, his arms closed around his chest.

“Ryan...” Justin said softly as he started to cry.

“You have to tell him,” I pleaded with my brother, as he was the only one with the power to stop this where it was.

“No.”

“Dad,” I started.  “Justin did this to defend a kid that was getting picked on because he’s gay.”

Justin started sobbing.  “Is this true?” Dad asked.

I looked at my brother, my eyes demanding that he simply tell Dad what had actually happened.

“Apparently, this kid was checking Justin out,” I started, since my brother wouldn’t say anything.  “And this other guy started picking on him.  Justin went to his defense, Dad.”

“Dad... I’m tired,” Justin added, finally finding the balls to just say it.

“Of what?” Dad asked.

“Of people picking on defenseless little kids.  I’m tired of people picking on kids ’cause they’re gay.  I’m tired of gay people getting attacked because of their sexuality.  I’m tired of living in fear that someone’s going to do to me someday what that guy did to Ryan,” Justin yelled in my father’s face.  “I beat the shit out of him because he was picking on some guy at school who couldn’t defend himself.  I beat the shit out of him for all the gay guys that have to endure what my fucking brother went through.”

Dad looked between the two of us.  Justin was emotional, to say the least.  I also began to weep.  It was almost as if I could feel Parker and Mom in the other room, completely aware of what was going on.  I could somehow feel Brand trying to wrap his mind around what he was hearing.

“Dad...  The other guy pushed this kid to the ground and was standing over him, with his dick out of his pants.  This kid never did anything to him,” Justin explained.  “And when he said something about me and punched me, I just lost it.  I mean.  What would he have done to this kid if I hadn’t come to him?  Would he have peed on him to show his superiority?  Would he have beaten him with a piece of pipe and left him to bleed in the locker room until someone the next period found him?”

I had to walk out of the room.  Images of the kind Justin described flooded my mind, taking me over.  I vividly remembered walking across the parking lot toward my apartment.  I recalled the white SUV pulling into the lot; I remembered it pulling into its space as Brian pulled out.  I saw a man climbing from the driver’s seat and walking toward me.  There was something in his hand.  I greeted him, wondering why he was there.  As I saw the metal object in his hand, it quickly became obvious.  I remembered him lifting his arm, toward my head.  Then there was pain.  So much pain.  There was a bright light, and I could no longer keep my balance.  I fell to my knees, begging for it to all end.  In a defenseless position, I slumped down, certain that I was about to die.  There was so such fear and more pain.  He lifted the object and struck me again.  That’s when it all went black.

I hadn’t lured him to my apartment.  I hadn’t started a rumor about a ‘keg party’ to get him to come.  I hadn’t done anything but be myself, and he felt offended by that.  He had waited on me to leave The Bar; he had followed Brian’s car, fully aware of what he was about to do.  He had calculated all this.  He had decided when I first encountered him at the bar that this was going to be his response to my personality.  I hadn’t done anything to him, nothing at all.  It was all so clear.  Everything was clear.  Fuck.

“Ryan?” Brand asked as he walked over to me.  I was in a dazed state.  I could hear him, but I couldn’t understand him.  I couldn’t respond.  “Ryan!” he said again as he walked from the entry to the dining room into the living room where I was standing.

I looked at him.  He was so sweet and so precious.  He was so hot and so smart.  He didn’t deserve to deal with my drama, my shit.  He looked so concerned; he was so concerned.  He loved me, I knew it, but I couldn’t see it then.  I was so absorbed in myself and my lot in life that I couldn’t realize it.

“I’ve got to go,” I said as I walked past him, out the back door.

I stood outside for a few seconds.  The air was thick.  It was getting dark outside, and the air was heavy, oppressive.  I could barely breathe.  I didn’t know if it were a result of the humidity or from the fact that I was again faced with everything that had transpired over the previous few months.  I thought about those first few days.  I thought about smoking weed for almost two months as I tried to figure out how to cope with things.

“Ryan,” Brand called to me softly as I stood there.  He walked up and wrapped his arms around me.

It felt so good; I felt so safe.  My mind wouldn’t let me just stay there, however.  I couldn’t stay there.  After a moment, his loving embrace became a chokehold.  I broke myself from him suddenly and began running.  I ran out into the woods, through the trails that had been made long before by Parker and his friends as they sought to get away from me.

“RYAN!” Brand yelled as he followed me.

My reality was all around me, like a cloud that was going to suffocate me the first chance it got.  I didn’t notice as I was running, but there was a limb in my way.  The way my foot landed, I couldn’t lift it above the limb as I continued on without thinking.

I lost my balance and fell to the ground.  I pushed out my arms to keep from landing on my head, but the force of the fall sent a sharp pain upward from my left wrist to the shoulder on the right side.

“FUCK!” I screamed as I lay there.

“RYAN!!!!” Brand yelled in concern.  I could almost hear from the tone of his voice that he had picked up speed and was running toward me with all the force in his body.

By the time he reached me, I had pulled myself up from the ground.  My left knee was skinned up.  I held my left arm gingerly with my right; something was definitely broken.

“Ryan!” he said as he stopped there, about ten feet away from me.  “Are you okay?” he asked softly, even as he looked at me and knew full well that I wasn’t.

“Brand,” I started, looking into his eyes.  “Brand...  I am in love with you.  I am more in love with you than you will ever know, but…”

“But what?” he asked.

“Brand...  You deserve so much more than me,” I said as I stood in front of him, breaking his heart.

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve been together for almost two months, and I haven’t even put out.”

“Baby...  I know you have things going on, and besides, you’re worth waiting for.”

“Am I?” I asked.  “I have so much baggage.  There are so many other guys that could make you happy without the baggage.”

“What happened?” he asked.  Brand took a step forward; I took a step back.  Something made me want to protect myself, but from what I didn’t know.

“He attacked me,” I told him.  He knew that part, but he didn’t know everything that had happened.  At my request, he hadn’t read any of the thesis to that point.  At that moment, he didn’t know of all the confusion and all the facts that I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt.

“What else?” Brand asked.

“I was drunk.  I was very, very drunk,” I said through my tears.  “I was so drunk that I couldn’t drive home from the bar.  I’d met these people... people that I didn’t know.  I introduced myself and tried to make sure that they were having a good time.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Brand asked as he took a step closer to me.  I didn’t step away from him this time.

“I don’t know.  That’s how I used to be.  I used to be really, really outgoing.”

“Okay…” he carefully took another step.

“They followed me home,” I went on.  “The guy who actually attacked me said that he felt like he’d been lured there, and that I’d lunged toward him.  He said that he did this out of self-defense, but he was totally lying.”

“What actually happened?”

“I climbed out of my friend Brian’s car.  If he were gay, I’d hook y’all two up,” I started, softly chuckling a wry laugh.

“That’s fine.  I’ve already met the one I want,” he said as he took yet another step toward me.

“I was walking toward my apartment when the guy climbed out of the car.  He had something in his right hand,” I said, looking down at my own right hand, the hand that was holding my left arm.  “He hit me with it once, and I fell to my knees.  Then, right before I blacked out, as I was there on my knees, he hit me again.”  I closed my eyes, and the images were as vivid in my imagination, in my conscious thought, that it was as if I were reliving them all over again.  I began to bawl uncontrollably.  The scar stung, just as it had for days after the attack.  “The next morning,” I started once more as Brand walked another step closer to me, “when I got back from the hospital, there was a pool of my blood on the pavement.  If it hadn’t been for my friends and my cousins that live in Tuscaloosa, I wouldn’t be here today.”

“And that would be my loss,” Brand said as he was within just enough distance to grab me and wrap my body in his arms.

“Oh, shit!” I said as he pulled my head down, leaving his hand there as I cried on his shoulder.  This man, a man that I barely knew but whom I implicitly trusted and even loved, comforted me in all the right ways.  It was as if he were my other half, the reason God let me survive, to have him, to know that he could comfort me in the way that I needed.

“It’ll be okay, baby,” he said.  “It’ll all be okay; I promise.  If you want, I’ll go beat him up for you.”

“Would you really?”

“In two seconds flat,” he responded with certainty.

I sort of laughed for a second.  We began to sway back and forth.  It took me a second to realize that we were standing in the middle of the woods dancing, with only the crickets and cicadas to serenade us.

“I love you, too, by the way,” he whispered.

I wish I could say that that one single moment took away all the pain and hurt, but it didn’t.  My heart and my soul were still broken, but hearing those words come from his mouth were more real and more soothing than anything in my recent memory.

“So, apparently...” Dad started as he walked out to where we were in the woods, “I was wrong about what happened at school today.”  We broke apart and both looked at Dad.  “Had I known that’s what happened a little earlier,” he said as he looked at me, “I wouldn’t have yelled so much.”

“Justin asked me not to tell you,” I said as I cried, holding my arm.

“I know.  He told me,” Dad said.

“I’m sorry,” I said as he stood there.

“No worries,” he said as he did so very often.  “I just wanted to make sure you were all right, though.  I’ll leave y’all alone,” he said as he turned and walked back toward the house.

“We should probably follow,” I suggested as I looked up to find that we would soon be without light.

“Sounds good to me,” he said as he wrapped his arms around my waist.  His touch felt so good.  I was trying to force myself to realize that I wasn’t just dreaming, that all this was real.  “So, you want to come over tonight?” he asked.

“Or you could just stay here...” I countered.

“What if tonight is the night?” he joked.

“Point.”

I wanted to say that THAT was the final moment, but it was obvious that there would be good times and bad times to come.  As we were going to bed at his apartment that evening, I told Brand that I was going to completely revise the thesis.  I told him that I needed to write a character after him: hot, sweet, smart, gallant, my Prince Charming, a man who could soothe the wildest beast within me.  Jokingly, as we put ourselves beneath the covers, me with a heavy wrist brace on my arm, he suggested that for better reading I should make the character more endowed than my man.  I simply smiled, looked at him, kissed him gently, and asked why on earth anyone would mess with perfection. 

To be continued...