Page 84 of Crying in the Rain

“Is it about Dan?”

Kris hid his face against Ade’s shoulder. Whether it was a lucky guess or he’d picked up on Kris’s unease earlier, Ade had got it in one.

“Is that where you were? Talking to Dan?”

“No,” Kris mumbled. “His mum.”

“OK.” Ade kissed Kris’s cheek and kept his head turned, speaking so quietly it was little more than a rumble in his chest. “If you don’t want to tell me more, I understand, but you’ve got me second-guessing, so I’ll ask one more question, and if you can answer it for my benefit…”

Kris straightened up so he could look Ade in the eye. “I’m not in love with Dan,” he said.

“Phew!” Ade laughed, but admitted, “I did wonder. You’re very close to him.”

“Yeah. We’ve known each other since we were kids. His mum was my childminder.” That was how he’d become caught up in conversation with her—she’d just found out she was Krissi’s grandmother, and to say she was in shock was putting it mildly. By the time he escaped, he felt as if he’d been through a military interrogation, interspersed with pearls of misplaced but well-meant wisdom about being true to himself and gratitude for ‘the wonderful thing he’d done’, standing by Shaunna and her daughter all these years.

Dan’s mum, like most people, saw the world in shades of straight and gay, and her son’s engagement party was not the place to challenge her, even if Kris had felt up to doing so, but she was right in one respect. The abuse was as much a part of who he was as his sexuality, and until he told Ade the full story, he wasn’t being true to either of them.

“It wasn’t just me.” The admission rushed from him in a barely intelligible stream. He didn’t dare look at Ade for fear of seeing judgement, revulsion, pity. Moments passed, thick and heavy in the silence, as Kris tried to get the rest of it out, but the words rattled around inside like forgotten lines from a script he’d never rehearsed because he’d never wanted to play this part.

“It was Dan too, wasn’t it?” Ade said eventually.

Kris nodded. The silence resumed. Ade reached out and gently lifted Kris’s face until he had to look at him.

“I’m here and I’m listening.”

“I don’t…” Kris sighed, his breath stuttering with his shivering.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“No, I do. I don’t know how.”

“I can understand that.”

“You managed to tell me about the ex.”

“Not really. I gave you the basics and let the bruises and drama do the talking.”

Kris didn’t have that option. His bruises were deep beneath the surface, and the drama…well, it was nothing compared to how Ade had suffered.

“He never even touched us.”

“He still hurt you.”

Kris heard the words, could still hear the music from the party, could feel the cold bite of frost forming around them, but he was straddling two worlds now, the thrum of the bass beat falling in time with the thump of heavy feet on the ladder up to the treehouse.

“He just watched, told us what to do, told us we liked it, that this was what little men did. You don’t want to get aroused by it, but you do. It’s over quicker if you can just make it happen, and you’re waiting to hear it, that grunt that tells you it’s finished.

“And you think,I’ll never get in this situation again, but there’s nothing you can do when he’s the one who’s supposed to be keeping you safe. We tried to stay away from the treehouse. We asked if we could go to Dan’s house after school, but there were no other grown-ups to look after us. My dad said maybe, when we got to high school, they’d think about it. So we played outside and talked about how we couldn’t wait to go to high school, pretending what we were feeling was excitement for that instead of it being a countdown to when it was over.”

Kris closed his eyes, but it only made the image stronger. Sometimes it consumed him completely and he was back there, inhabiting the memory, missing the football every time Dan kicked it to him, neither of them acknowledging it, just talkingabout learning new subjects with new teachers. Now, with Ade’s arms around him and the quiet hums to confirm he was listening, Kris was watching his younger self from a distance, saw the resignation settle on his and Dan’s faces as the sky darkened and the trees began to sway. He held out his hand, palm up, behind Ade’s back. The rain was in his head too.

“We got away with it for ages,” he said. “Keeping out of his way. But then there was this massive storm and we had no choice. We were drenched in seconds, and we thought Uncle Anders was in his room, so we’d be OK sheltering in the treehouse. But he was in there already. It stank of his sweat—he’d been gardening, and his hands were covered in soil, the trowel was on the floor next to him, his boots…”

Sweat and shit and hot damp wood, drip-drip-drip through the hole in the corner, heavy feet, a voice—

“Dan?”

“Mike came to pick Dan up, and he caught us. Literally dragged Dan from the treehouse. He was crying. And Anders…he just smiled, said, ‘What a shame,’ and left me there. I wanted to stay there forever, but Mum and Dad came home from work and made me come inside. Mike had told his mum, and all hell broke loose. They wanted to know why we hadn’t told a grown-up, but how can you? How do you even begin to say the words when you don’t know what they are?

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