“Sure, honey.” Gwen patted my cheek and told me she and mom would wait for me out front. I loved that woman hard.
I hammered on the call button for the elevator, willing it to hurry the hell up. As soon as the doors opened, I stepped inside and waited close enough to the door that I’d scare anyone who was waiting in the hall when they opened.
The door opened and I sprinted to our suite, tossing the tray of food on top of our nightstand dresser. “Babe, you gotta get up.”
“Go ’way,” Gabe grumbled, tucking the blanket over his head. “Too early.”
“I’m not playing, Gabe. You have to get your butt out of bed. I went down to grab breakfast since we skipped dinner, and I had an unpleasant surprise.”
Gabe shot upright. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? No one tried fucking with you, did they?”
“No, my knight in shining armor, nothing so pleasant,” I teased. Eventually, his incessant need to take care of me would grow old. I was totally capable of taking care of myself if I felt threatened. I didn’t need to call my boyfriend to my rescue. “The moms are here.”
“What do you mean they’re here?” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, reaching for the coffee he’d gotten used to me having ready for him when he woke up if I wasn’t already in class. I shook my head and crossed the room to start the brew as I explained the surprise attack this morning.
“They think you’re still asleep, so I’m going to go to breakfast with them and then maybe head down to the beach for a bit.”
“Why do you get to go for breakfast on their dime and I have to stay here?”
“Because while they complain to me about how we forget that we promised to visit, you’re going to clean the room. It stinks and we need to make sure there’s nothing we don’t want them to see. If they had their way, they’d have come up here with me.”
Without even turning on the light, I knew there was a bottle of lube, a box of condoms, and the small butt plug Gabe had teased me with last night sitting on the dresser. If they’d come up, our only hope of holding onto our dignity would have been them being too distracted by the mess to notice.
Gabe looked around the room as he sipped his coffee. “It’s not that bad in here.”
“No, but it stinks. Cleaning everything to make sure it passes a white glove test will make the room smell more like responsible adults and less like horny teenagers.”
“But we are horny teenagers,” Gabe argued.
“Yeah, but are you ready to tell your mom we’re screwing around?”
Gabe shrugged. Crap. Was he thinking about telling them the truth? No, he would have told me if he was going to do anything like that. “We’re going to have to break it to them at some point.”
“Yeah, but do you want that to be what we do this weekend? Because you know they’re going to have plenty to say about it. My mom will cry because I didn’t tell her I was gay as soon as I knew, then she’ll lose her shit because I’m with you.”
“Hey, I’m not that bad.” Gabe tossed a pillow at me and I threw it back, nearly dumping his cup of coffee all over the bed.
“You know they’re not going to accept us being together. Even if both families are cool with us being gay, being gay together is totally different.” If I wasn’t careful, I was going to work myself into a full-blown panic attack. Every fear I had about our families finding out about our relationship came spewing out of my mouth.
Gabe set down his coffee and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me into the bed with him. He held me tightly, letting me vent all my anxiety. When I was done, he rubbed my back and kissed my shoulder. “Feel better. Now?”
“A little, yeah,” I admitted. Giving a voice to everything that’d been running through my mind should have compounded my fear, but instead, I realized partway through how ridiculous I sounded. Some of my worries were completely justified, but I knew, deep down, that Gabe would be there to help me face whatever came our way. “I’m sorry. I know you want us to say screw it to what everyone else thinks and do our own thing, but I’m not wired that way. As much as I care about you, I do worry about the family turning their backs on us because they think we’re freaks.”
“We’re not freaks, perverts, deviants, or anything else,” he said with conviction. “If anyone thinks that, that’s a failing on their part. Is our situation ideal? No. But you know what? Every relationship has hurdles to jump. Ours just happen to be a bit higher and more complicated. But we’re worth it.”
“I know.” I sighed, wishing I didn’t have to get back downstairs to head out for breakfast. Even if we didn’t do anything else, laying here with Gabe was my idea of a perfect Saturday morning.
“But to answer the question that started this entire spiral, no, I’m not thinking about coming out to them anytime soon. I’m not stupid enough to think I’ll be able to hide the way I feel about you forever, but maybe by the time we’re ready to admit what’s been going on, they’ll have their suspicions and it won’t be a shock. They’ll see how we treat one another and they’ll eventually agree we’re what they always hoped for in partners for their kids.”
“Well, except the whole part where we’re guys. I don’t know about Gwen and Joel, but my mom and dad weren’t dreaming of me falling in love with a man.” I decided against telling him I had a hunch his mom knew something was up.
“Is that your way of admitting you do love me?” His voice was more uncertain than I’d ever heard it.
“Did you doubt that I do?”
“Well, every time I brought it up, you changed the subject as quickly as possible, so I wasn’t sure.” This raw vulnerability from Gabe was new. Unnerving. But also reassuring, because it proved the one thing I’d been on the fence about; there was no longer any doubt he was as serious about us as I was.
“I’ve loved you since before I knew how to put a name to the emotion. When other kids at school started talking about the girls they liked, I wished I could tell them I felt that way about you.”
“Damn, it’s too early for this many heavy conversations.” I glanced back and noticed Gabe’s eyes looked suspiciously shiny in the low light peeking between our curtains. “I’m glad you finally told me. That’s part of why I hadn’t wanted to do more than fool around with you. I told myself it’d be easier that way if you decided you wanted to see other people.”
“Never,” I assured him, nearly adding a quip about how I didn’t have time to date anyone who wasn’t sleeping in the same room as me to break the tension. I stopped myself, because I was beginning to see how fragile Gabe’s ego was when it came to us.
“As nice as this is, you should probably head back downstairs before your mom comes up to see if you got lost,” he told me, playfully pushing me out of bed. “I’ll clean up, open the window, maybe find one of those air freshener things Seth sticks everywhere, and then I’ll text you.” He seemed determined to not let me down on this. He understood now just how much it’d messed with my head to think about our families finding out what we’d been getting up to since moving away from home, and I had faith he’d do everything in his power to help me keep us a secret until we were both ready to make a big announcement.
