Page 19 of Shades of Henry
“Only when we wandered into traffic,” Lance said, his brow still furrowed. “And that’s the truth. Only time I saw my little sister get spanked was when she jerked away from my mom’s hand to get something in the street. Mom must have been terrified, but Morgaine never did it again.”
“My youngest brother, Sean, fell in a creek on a family hike once.” Henry remembered that day, him being the good little soldier, just behind his mom, thinking that Davy was going to get in trouble. “Dad wasn’t even there. If Davy hadn’t done that thing he does, running around in back to check on everybody in line, Sean would have drowned. So we get back from the hike, and Davy and Sean are wet and covered in mud, and he’s got blisters because he carried Sean back the whole way. And what does Dad do? He gives Sean a solid ass-spanking for poking around in the creek and not being where he should be.”
“Harsh,” Lance murmured.
“You think so?” Henry shook his head. “’Cause Davy got the belt for wrecking the new leather boots he’d worn when Mom had told him to wear the crappy ones he’d grown out of.”
Lance made a hurt sound. “That’s not a lot of incentive to do the right thing.”
Henry nodded, his throat tight. “That’s why I joined the Army,” he said, wishing this didn’t hurt so much. “Because I thought, hey, being a soldier, all you gotta do to do the right thing is follow orders.”
“Mm. How’d that work for you?”
Henry tried a tight smile, but judging by Lance’s continued wide-eyed sober look, it didn’t work that well. “Not so much.”
“Why not?”
Henry took a deep breath, one that shuddered on its way out. “Would you like a beer? I’d like a beer—”
“C’mon, Henry, who’s it going to hurt?”
Henry closed his eyes and stopped trying to get off the couch. “Me.”
“Can it feel any worse telling me than keeping it inside?”
“I didn’t even tell David.” That hurt. He’d been there for more than a month. It was what? Mid-May? He’d had dinner with his brother at least once a week, played with Frances, pretended not to enjoy the assortment of snakes, turtles, and iguanas that lived in their house and backyard, and rolled his eyes at Kane every chance he got so he could feel just a little bit like the person he was hadn’t been left behind completely. But he hadn’t talked about why he was there, and Davy hadn’t asked. Maybe Travis had called him—their older brother still got Christmas cards and called Davy every month or so, and he didn’t care if Mom and Dad knew it. But David was still waiting for Henry, and Henry appreciated that, but it also got scarier every day he stayed.
“Tell me,” Lance urged. “If things go south, you can pick up and leave again, but we’d miss you. And if I keep this confidential, just you and me, and we keep going, every day, like we’ve been, you’ll be one step closer to knowing it’s okay.”
Henry regarded him soberly for a moment. “You already know about me,” he said, his chest contracting. “You know my brother, you know the Army kicked me out, which means I failed at life. What about you? You appear to be winning at life, but I don’t understand….” Oh hell.No, Henry, don’t open up that cup of porn worms!
“Because,” Lance said, not flinching. “Because my whole life, I was told I was important. I could be anything. I could fly. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew how my parents voted. They didn’t go to church often, but I knew what the church said about people like me. So I was twelve, and I realized exactly who I was, and I was pretty sure Mom and Dad weren’t going to be so excited about that. They’d given money to the local pray-the-gay-away place.”
Henry closed his eyes. “My dad actually said he should have sent Davy there when he was a kid. He thought him and the neighbor kid were too close.”
“Well, they were super excited about this place in Nevada—said it was God’s answer to all the bad homosexuality in the world.”
“I wish,” Henry muttered,reallywishing this wasn’t a part of him.
“I don’t,” Lance said, and his voice grew low, vicious, and gleeful. “I had to hide it—Ihadto hide it. I buried myself in schoolwork, hid my porn, beat off like a motherfucker. I probably gave Randy a run for his money in my senior year. I’m not even ashamed. And I held it. I held it through my first seven years of school. God, I was so close to my internship, it was like I could smell a paycheck.”
“What happened?” Henry asked, fascinated. He never saw Lance like this—never saw him angry, or bitter, or impassioned. The man he’d learned to appreciate was usually smiling, always compassionate, gentle as a… well, a doctor, with the hormonally insane adult children they were sharing an apartment with.
“I had a boyfriend at the time—a doctor. Nice guy. My….” Lance swallowed. “My first, really. First lover, first love. And we were out for dinner, good restaurant, wine. He put his hand on top of mine and told me he was already married but he’d like to put me up in an apartment so he could pay my way through med school.”
Henry shot bolt upright. “What. An.Asshole!”
Lance gave a bitter laugh. “You think? So did I. I stormed out—and ran right into my parents, who were there with some work friends of my father. And there was Teddy, right behind me, yelling, ‘Galahad, I hate to lose you!’”
Henry’s brain trainwrecked. “Galahad?”
Lance’s cheeks colored. “Swear to Christ, it’s my real name.”
Galahad, Lancelot—Henry got it, and he managed a grin in full bloom. “Suits you.”
Lance snorted. “So would Gawain, but nobody can pronounce it.”
But that’s not what the story was about. “What did your parents do?” Henry asked, and even though he had a pretty good idea, given where Lance was now, he wanted it to be a happy ending. Lance was such a good guy, a good person.
