Page 92 of The Fireman and the Flirt

“Santa is making a Starbucks run.”

“He drinks Starbucks?” Dad made the same face I made at the coffee chain. Starbucks disdain was in our DNA.

He sat at the kitchen table and munched on a celery stick. Dad invited me to join him rather than hover over the fridge.

“How you been, Cary?” he asked.

“Good. Same as always.”

“You sure? Because you seemed a little down tonight.” He tipped his head. Parents had a supernatural power to tell when their kids were upset. Dad could always see through my brave face.

“I’m not used to eating so many carbs.”

“Don’t you have a cupboard full of individual mac n cheese cups?”

“Guilty.” Darn him and his exceptional memory. “Dad, am I going to be alone forever?”

When I used to get scared during thunderstorms, I would crawl onto Dad’s lap. I knew there wasn’t much he could do to control the weather, but his warmth and his Old Spice smell had a way of comforting me. I wished I could get away with this as a fortysomething man.

“You’re not alone. You have me, your mom, Harold and Audrey, your friends.”

“You know what I mean.”

He patted my hand, his eyes sleepy but alert. “There’s a special guy out there for you.”

We’d come a long way for him to be able to say that. I had worried that coming out would permanently damage my relationship with my parents, but through time and love, we had emerged a stronger unit.

“There is,” I admitted. Things with Derek had been as close to perfect as could be. “But I let him go.”

“Now why would you do a knuckleheaded thing like that?” asked Dad, ever the romantic, apparently.

“I know I haven’t shared much about my dating life. That’s because there hasn’t been much to share. It’s been mostly tragic.” I didn’t want my parents feeling sorry for me. I didn’t want all their worst fears about having a gay son to be true. “Dad, do you remember in high school when you had to drive one of my friends home?”

I felt nauseous referring to Gaston as a friend. Even now, all these years later, I was still trying to minimize the shame.

“Vaguely. He’d driven over drunk, and your mom followed behind?”

I nodded. A lump formed in my throat as I remembered he and Mom in their pajamas, tired from long days, shuffling into their car. Yes, in the grand scheme of things, having them drive home a “friend” wasn’t a big deal, but for some reason, it broke my heart. It made me feel like a failure of a son.

Tears fell down my face, a dam finally breaking.

“He wasn’t my friend, Dad. He was…we did stuff together.”

I waited for it to click in Dad’s mind. I wouldn’t give Gaston the courtesy of calling him my boyfriend or my lover. He fulfilled neither of those roles.

“There were certain things I wasn’t comfortable doing, and he didn’t like that. So he made up a story about me and told the whole school. And everyone believed it. He was mean to me.”

And that was the hardest part to admit. That he was mean to me. That I was the victim, no matter what kind of self-empowerment lens I chose to view it through. That I allowed myself to feel weak.

I wiped away my tears. Why was I rehashing this? I always thought it would be better if my parents didn’t know. They had enough on their plate. But shielding them only made things tougher on me. It only made me learn to push people away.

“He sounds like a real asshole.” It was a charge of relief to hear Dad call him an asshole.

“He was.”

Dad fiddled with a carrot stick, the wheels actively turning in his head. “I think I know what the story was.”

I met his eyes, and without having to say a word, the squeamish pinch of his face told me we were thinking of the same story.

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