Page 19 of Just Forever

He mulls it over for a long time.

“How did it go for you?” he asks. “Coming out. You’ve never told me.”

“I’ve had a variety of experiences. Most people do. It’s not a one-time thing. You get to do it a lot over the years. Some people will accept you, some won’t. Sometimes it’ll suck a lot, but then some people will surprise you, too.”

“What about your mother?”

I laugh, this time pretty genuinely. “She didn’t care. I’m pretty sure she was having man trouble with somebody back then, so she had other things in mind. I mean, I worked myself up into a pretty decent state beforehand. Wrote everything I planned to say down and rehearsed it and all because I wanted to get it just right. Then I sort of panicked and just blurted it out. ‘Mom, I’m gay.’ Know what she said to that?”

“Knowing your mom, it could be literally anything.”

“‘Oh.’ End of quote. And then she said something like, ‘Uh-huh. That’s nice, honey’ and went back to texting furiously about whatever asshole she was dating back then. I think it was Pete.”

“Magician Pete?”

Yeah. Some of the guys my mom’s dated have been more memorable than others.

Ryker snickers. “Why did those two crazy kids break up again?”

“He wasn’t just doing magic, he was also doing his magician’s assistant. I guess you could say he was an overachiever.”

“Oh yeah. That was when your mom caught them and Pete was trying to tell her he was trying to saw the assistant in half, wasn’t it?”

“Yup. And Mom said, ‘There’s already a hole there, so you didn’t need to waste your time with that part.’”

Ryker laughs out loud before he grins at me. “Good ol’ Pete.”

“It all went downhill from there.”

Ryker’s still smiling at me. “She was okay with it?”

“Genevive’s okay with it, too. She just seems to have concerns and didn’t know how to address them that well. It could’ve gone worse.”

“Are we getting some more space references?”

I push at his shoulder. “She could’ve been not okay with you being bi. She could’ve asked you why you can’t just find a nice girl to date. She could’ve told you it was just a phase, and she should know because she went through the same thing in college.”

“That would’ve been fun,” Ryker says.

“A real mom and son bonding moment right there,” I say before I pat his knee. “All I’m saying is that she accepts you. She’s probably just worried about you.I’mworried about you. You might say I kind of get where she’s coming from.”

Ryker lets out a frustrated breath and glowers. And glowers. And glowers.

“It shouldn’t be such a fucking thing,” he bursts out after a little bit. “It’s nobody’s business but ours, so why the fuck would anybody need to care who any of us is sleeping with?”

I watch him calmly. I’m pretty sure most of us have tried to find an answer to that. Why it’s such a big deal. Who cares.

It shouldn’t matter.

But to some, it still does.

“Maybe I should just do it. Just come out and deal with the noise that follows.”

“Only neither of us is that interested in the noise,” I point out.

His shoulders slump. “Still,” he grumbles.

It’s not that either of us can really know what would happen if Ryker officially came out. We can speculate, but there aren’t really that many examples in professional sports. And none of the people who have come out have done it because they married their stepbrother. There’s a good chance that would be an issue. Or maybe I’m cynical, and it wouldn’t be. But the thought that I could somehow make Ryker’s life more difficult is a daunting prospect, and what it boils down to in the end is that I don’t know if I’m willing for Ryker to take the risk.

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