“No,” he mumbles.
I suck in a breath. “So, you went wild in your college days?”
“No,” he says in a tiny voice.
Okay, now I’m perplexed. Jade looks so miserable. He is all hunched up as if braced for a punch. He looks… ashamed. But having fun is nothing to be ashamed about. I’m only surprised because he seems so shy. I didn’t think he was the type to fly through Grindr.
Has someone told him his past is wrong? Some stupid nonsense about being dirty?
Jade draws his knees up to his chest and hugs his legs. He hides his face and turns into a small ball of misery.
I blink. Then my guts feel with cold, jagged ice. My jaw drops open with horror.
I think this is Jade’s dark past. The shit he has been through. The stuff he never wants to talk about.
He isn’t talking about consensual fun. He is talking about evil. About violence and abhorrent violations.
Oh god. I want to hug him and hold him tight. I want to kiss him and promise him that nobody is ever going to hurt him ever again.
I lean gently closer. “I don’t care about the past. The future is the only thing that interests me.”
Jade peaks over his knees to stare at me incredulously. His green eyes are bright. Shining through the shadows of my living room.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I say softly.
His eyebrows shoot up and a silence settles around us. The film babbles away in the background, casting flickering light around the room.
“The guys I live with, we were all held captive together by a wealthy asshole.”
I nod solemnly and concentrate on keeping my expression neutral. I need to listen, not display my horror and outrage.
“He…he named us after colors. Red, Blue, Gray, Pink, Yellow, but everyone called him Lello. And Ned was Indigo, but he refused to use it. It was… we were Ritchie’s Rainbow. His harem. For his own use and for his friends.”
My mind is spinning. Whirling. It latches onto something stupid and thoroughly unimportant.
“Ritchie? Ritchie Smithson? That tech-bro jerk?”
Jade nods slowly.
“Didn’t he fall off his balcony and die after taking too much cocaine?”
Jade grows pale. “Um… yeah. That’s how we were freed.” He squirms uncomfortably. “The harem was covered up. Bad publicity. That’s why you haven’t heard about it.”
I shuffle a little closer. Hopefully not so close that I’m making him feel crowded. I’d like to take his hand, but he’s hugging his knees so tightly I can’t reach them.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say as calmly as I can.
I don’t want him to hear my anger because it is not for him. It is for a dead man and the injustice of it all.
Jade nods and then looks determinedly at the TV screen. That’s fair enough. I angle myself away from him and also pretend to be engrossed in the film. It’s a good excuse to give him space. He’s bound to be feeling all sorts of emotions after sharing his trauma with me.
And to be honest, I’m kind of reeling too. I know dark and awful stuff happens in the world. But I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in real life who has been subjected to something of this level.
A good twenty minutes pass in silence. It feels weighted, but not tense, and I’ll take that as a good sign. Especially when he lowers his feet down to the floor and sits in a much more relaxed position.
“Did you really want to give me a blow job?” Jade blurts suddenly.
I can see him blushing out of the corner of my eye. So, out of mercy, I keep looking at the TV.
