It broke my heart to admit that I knew how much he loved me. Even though he hadn’t said the words, I’d felt it in my bones. And damn, I loved him too. But I still couldn’t do this. I couldn’tsay the words.
“You’re still not going to tell him, are you?”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I hoped I would be able to ward off the blow of my heart cracking in half. “I can’t.”
“Then I will.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
“The night before the wedding, he told me—”
“Shut the fuck up. Get out of my house.” My energy had vaporized, and every drop of strength was gone with each word he spoke.
“He wished me as much luck in my marriage as Mom and Dad had in theirs.”
Quinn moved forward. “That doesn’t seem like the best reason to punch your brother in the face,” he challenged Patrick.
“It does when you know the truth.” Patrick’s response was aimed at me, a bluff. If I didn’t finish the story, he would.
The weight of it all came crushing down on me. Knowing I’d lost Quinn one way orthe other, I decided to spit out the words I’d been holding back for so long. “It was an insult because their marriage was a sham. Maybe it still is, who knows?”
“So what?” Quinn scoffed. “That’s the big secret you’ve been holding onto for all this time.That’swhy you ran away? Because your parents don’t have a great marriage? Are you kidding?”
“No.” Gritting my teeth and clenching my jaw,I was growing angrier by the second. “I left because I’m not even their son.”
“Because they disowned you because you were gay?” Quinn’s voice was colored in confusion, shaded in hurt.
“They don’t even know about that.” I was hoping that would be enough to answer his question, but when his brows twisted together, I knew I would actually have to speak the words.
“She was a stripper. From whatDad told me, and he was a little shady on the details, she had run away from home. No one even knew her real name. Couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old. I can’t even begin to imagine what could have been so horrible in her life that she had to run away. And her only way to survive was to strip for grown men who knew better than to take advantage.”
Having never spoken thesewords before, I struggled to fill in all the gaps. Quinn took advantage of one such pause to ask, “Who the hell are you talking about?”
“My birth mom.”
Written plainly across Quinn’s face were all the reasons I never wanted to tell anyone. Sadness, pity, shame… they were all there. “Dad was a frequent visitor,” I continued. Taking a deep breath didn’t help get air into my lungs. I was suffocating,the truth pressing the life out of me. “I’m sure he thought nothing of it. A few one-night stands with some girl who didn’t exist to anyone else but him. He probably didn’t think he’d ever get caught. And he probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t shown up.”
“What do you mean?”
“She died giving birth to me. Some kind of abruption. But before that, she put my father’s name on the paperwork. Maybeshe had it from a credit card, or when they checked his license at the bar, but she knew who he was. She had no other family. No one came looking for her. There was no missing person’s report. She was literally a nobody. And then Patrick was born five days later. When my father told my mom, she didn’t know what to do at first. They could’ve put me up for adoption or sent me through the hell of fostercare. I don’t know exactly what made her do it, but she decided to take me and raise me as her own. I guess she didn’t want Patrick not to know his brother. They moved away, started their lives over in North Carolina, presented us as twins, and that was that.”
“I… uh… I don’t know—”
“Oh, it gets better,” I scoffed. “The night my parents decided to let me go to the school I wanted to go to, theytold both Patrick and me about this whole ‘you’re not really twins thing.’ Nice graduation present, huh?” I looked over at Patrick who nodded in agreement. It might have been the first time in our entire lives we agreed on something. “We were both in shock and when we went to our room, I broke down. Cried like a baby. It was just so damn much to deal with. My real mother was dead. How the helldo you get over that, you know?”
“Oh, Ryan. I’m just so sor—”
“Don’t finish that sentence, please.” Quinn nodded and regretfully swallowed the rest of the word as it dangled from his tongue. “Anyway,” I carried on as if I were telling an old drinking story, “I don’t know what made me do it. Maybe it was that I needed to feel like I belonged. Maybe it was knowing that Patrick had just been dealtthe same blow I’d been, and he might feel some kind of compassion, but whatever it was, that was the night I decided to come out. To him.” I aimed my words directly at my brother. “I thought he’d understand. I thought maybe he’d be willing to hear me out, help me make sense of it all, especially since he had all this new information, too. But since he’s such a stand-up man, that’s not exactlywhat happened.”
“That’s not fair,” Patrick cut in. “It was—”
“Shut the fuck up,” I snapped, not at all caring about whatever he had to say. “What you did was the shittiest thing ever. You used my vulnerability against me and told me they’d hate me even more. You used the fact that I’d just learned I was a bastard, and that my real mother was dead… you used that all against me and made me feelless than human.”
“I was a kid,” he defended. I hated that I heard sadness in his voice, but I simply didn’t have the energy to care.
“So was I,” I spat. “We fought,” I continued explaining to Quinn. “And then I went to your house to say goodbye, except I couldn’t. That night you made me feel like I belonged somewhere.”
“You do. My God, Ryan. You do belong,” Quinn’s words trailed over as hechoked back his emotions.
