“Hey, did you guys get the article I mailed you?”
Cliff raised his eyebrows.
“Cliff got a great write-up.” Alex nudged him with his elbow, full of pride. “I sent it a few days ago.”
“The mail’s been a little slow. We can’t wait to read it,” his dad said.
“It was kind of a dating ad,” Alex said with a laugh. “Cliff is going to be quite the ladies man. I even had a few girls ask me if I could introduce them to my baby bro.” He kept nudging with his damn elbow, like a comedian desperate for a laugh.
Except Cliff wasn’t laughing.
Not at all.
When the call ended a few minutes later, Alex got up to take a leak, but Cliff didn’t move. His hands turned to fists, an unexplainable wave of anger rising in his throat.
“What are you up to now? Do you have practice?” Alex asked when he came back from the bathroom.
Cliff didn’t respond.
“Yo. You alive?”
Alex waved a hand in front of his face. Cliff smacked it away with such force that Alex flew back and hit the wall. Cliff bolted from his chair, possessed by a white fury that had clenched his body.
The straw had officially broken the gay camel’s back.
“What the fuck?” Alex yelled.
“You don’t know?” Cliff said in a low rumble.
“What was that for? What did I do?” Alex rubbed his arm where he made contact with the wall.
“You think that article is true?” Cliff felt himself getting hotter. He was having an out-of-body experience that he couldn’t stop. “You think I’m going to be quite the ladies man?”
“Yeah…” Alex said, as if it were fact. “They’ll be all over you.”
“No, they won’t!” Cliff slammed his hand on the table for emphasis. God, he was tired. He was so tired. Greg was right. He didn’t realize how exhausting this was. “I’m gay, you fucking idiot!”
And there it was. The dam burst open. Yet Cliff was nowhere near done.
“I’m gay. How could you not see?” Cliff shook with tears of release, of sadness, of anger.
“Cliff, I didn’t know.”
“Why didn’t you? This is so hard.” His voice wobbled in his throat. “I just wish people knew, and that I didn’t have to announce it like this. You don’t have to come out as straight.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’ve been next to you this whole time. There were clues. Why didn’t you see any of them?”
Alex stayed against the wall, his confident, fun self stripped away. A hint of fear flushed across his face. “I-I don’t know.”
“I’ve never been a ladies man. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never wanted a girlfriend or talked to you about girls.”
“Your clues weren’t easy to read. You’ve always been so quiet and reserved.”
Cliff thought back to his toast at the French restaurant, the dinner before their parents left and Cliff officially became a Whitetail. He was a stranger to all of them. “You keep making these jokes about how I need to come out of my shell. Why do you think I was so quiet? It’s because I am constantly in fear of saying the wrong thing and being found out.”
Looking back, Cliff didn’t know how he did it, how he mustered the energy to play ball and play straight. Both required full-time commitment and unwavering focus.
“Maybe you should have listened harder,” he continued. “But you don’t. If people aren’t on your wavelength, you don’t try to understand them.”
Silence filled the air. Cliff heaved in deep breaths.
