“You know shoes are a thing, right?” Denny raised a brow at him.
“Yes, daddy.” Josiah stuck out his tongue and hopped next to him on the rock. “And yeah, it was a lowercase D, don’t panic.” He winked, and something about the expression or maybe the implication made Denny flush.
“Did she answer?” he asked instead of commenting on the… thing.
“Not yet, but I think she will when she can.”
“She always does.”
Josiah leaned against his side and put his head on Denny’s shoulder. “I miss her.”
Denny hummed. “Same.”
“Has she talked to you about coming out publicly yet?” Jo asked quietly.
“Not yet, but I think she will.” The way his relationship with Sammie worked would’ve been weird to some people. They could have conversations in two modes: as friends, and as him being her hands-on recording company owner-slash-manager. Melody worked on the daily stuff for Sammie and a couple of their other bigger names, but Sammie was the only one who Denny still kept managing himself as much as he could.
They could talk as friends, and none of those conversations would ever cross the line of their working relationship. She had talked about coming out before, several times in fact, but she hadn’t told him to talk business with her before those musings.
“Yeah, I think she will, too. What will you say?”
“That she needs to be absolutely certain. She’ll face backlash for sure. Not in the way she might if she came out as gay or anything like that, but there are still so many people who think asexuality isn’t even real and….”
“There will be people who want to fix her, among other things.”
“Yeah, exactly.” Denny sighed. “I don’t want that for her, but I also know how important it would be to the ace community to have someone as big as her to come out, you know.”
Jo nodded against his shoulder. “I remember when Ellen DeGeneres came out. My whole school was buzzing about it, and I remember that one girl in drama class who got side-eyed even harder after. But there just weren’t that many role models back then. And of course then the whole George Michael thing the year after that.” He huffed bitterly. “I came out because of how my parents were talking about him and ‘the gays’ after. Just because he got outed by the tabloids.”
“I didn’t know that was the reason you came out.”
“Yeah. My parents were appalled that someone would go and hook up in a public bathroom, and that if the other guy were a cop on a sting operation then good for the cop, Michael got what he deserved, right?” Josiah started to pick at the tiny hole on the knee of Denny’s most comfortable sweats.
He didn’t know what to say. Besides, Josiah knew him well enough that he’d know what Denny would say anyway.
After a while, Josiah’s fingertip hit Denny’s skin through the fabric. The touch was innocent, but something about it pulled every cell in Denny’s body towards the point of contact.
“They ranted about it for days after work. I was barely seventeen. I hadn’t been bullied, really, but I wasn’t far from it. You know, on the fringes of the circle where you do get shit for being different. I just was… different in a way they couldn’t really pinpoint.”
Denny pried Josiah’s fingers from his sweats and held his hand as they sat there. As if transported back in time, Josiah spoke in a tone that wasn’t quite in the present.
“I got so mad. I already felt alone as fuck in that small town. I hadn’t cared for his music much, but I knew who he was, you know? I knew Wham! and there was a cover of their song that this former boy band member had on the radio during my teens at some point before, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I knew of this guy, that’s the point. And he was probably like me, and now my own parents, shitty as they were, talked shit about him, so it might as well have been me.” Again, Josiah went silent and it took Denny a few moments to realize that he heard a small sniffle from his friend. Instinctively, he moved the arm Jo was leaning against and wrapped it around his shoulders.
How he’d never known the whole story, he wasn’t sure. They talked about everything, even their sex lives, for fuck’s sake. Why hadn’t he known this about his best friend? Then it hit him: he hadn’t known because Josiah hadn’t wanted to talk about it before.
“I threw my sexuality into their faces. I almost told them about what had happened to me at camp a few times, and at one of their precious clubs they sent me to. But then I’d realized if I told them, they’d blame my gayness on that. Like I’d beenmadeinto this homosexual abomination by some groping and suggestive talk from closeted freaks.”
Denny’s temper rose at the thought of anyone making advances on Jo against his will, but the fact that someone had assaulted him while he was achildand he felt he couldn’t go to his parents about it? That…well, that made him sad. He felt hatred towards the people who had made Josiah happen.
Once upon a time when he’d learned that Jo didn’t have contact with his parents because he’d been kicked out for being gay, he’d thought that at least those people had made Josiah. That they had a redeeming quality in that. But now he wasn’t so sure. He was eternally grateful to the universe for giving him Josiah, but if his parents were incinerated on the spot by a meteorite, he’d be fucking fine with it.
“Do you know if they’re still alive?” Denny asked when it seemed like Josiah wasn’t going to talk more.
“I don’t. I’ve thought about finding out, but it doesn’t feel like something that would end well for me either way.” He huffed and wiped his eyes with the back of his free hand. “And it’s not like I changed my name, right? If they wanted to find me, they would’ve.”
And that, right there, was the hurt, Denny realized. They’d kicked Josiah out and they’d never tried to find him again. Never wanted anything to do with the child they’d created after leaving him to fend for his own at seventeen.
Denny squeezed Josiah. “But you have family now. We’re all your family. The fact that they managed to copulate and pop you out is the best thing they ever did in their miserable lives. Maybe, if they didn’t kick you out, you would’ve never come to Illinois. Maybe you’d never found a little bar called the Hoppy Hare. I’m kind of happy you did, even if you had to fight each step of the way to get there.”
