Going Bi – Final Chapter

I’m sorry to be so late again. Unbelievable schedule lately. I do have a bonus, though — a short story I began which I’ll post soon as The Tent.
Time to end this one, though. It’s easy to let a story drag out too long, and this one is at about the limit. Thanks to all who have stuck with me this long.

If you are not into gay, or boy on boy, please do not bother reading this chapter. You’ll be disappointed, I guarantee.

***



“What are you doing out here alone?” Jason asked. He had found me lying on my stomach on a float in the pool with my eyes closed. I wasn’t the type to contemplate suicide, but I was hoping the self-immolation of a serious sunburn. I deserved it.

“Go away, Jason,” I told him.

“Where’s Tyler?”

“He left.”

“Left?”

I shaded my eyes with my hand so I could look up at him. “I told him about you and me, and he left,” I said.

“You didn’t have to tell him,” Jason said, taking a seat cross-legged on the pool deck.

“Yeah, I did. Sooner or later.”

“And he’s pissed?”

“Pissed probably isn’t the word. Devastated is probably the word.”

“Sorry, Brock,” Jason said with a sad smile. “Think he’ll get over it?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“I can talk to him” Jason said. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow at swim team.”I’ll tell him it was my fault.”

I rolled onto my back. “Thanks, but I don’t think that will make much difference.”

“I’ll get him back for you,” Jason promised. “You’ll see.”

I closed my eyes and leaned back on the float. “I did sort of blame it on you,” I confessed. “I said you collected your blackmail.”

“I did.”

I cracked an eye open at him. “No. You didn’t. That was just my excuse.”

Jason sat quietly a moment. “Did you get to have sex with him before he left?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” Jason shrugged. “I was gonna volunteer to suck dicks with you if you wanted.”

“No thanks.”

“You sure? I mean, I just promised to talk to Tyler for you tomorrow.” He wriggled his eyebrows at me.

I gave him a sharp glance.

“Yeah, bad timing,” Jason agreed and got up from the pool deck. “Hey! You want to head over to the motorcross park?”

It was a good idea. I could work out my frustration there and it was better than a sunburn. “Sure.”



I tossed and turned that night. It was nearly three in the morning before I finally fell asleep, but I was up early to remind Jason before he left for swimming that he said he would talk to Tyler for me. I remained nervous all morning. I even thought about going to watch their swim practice, but decided to let Jason talk to Tyler first. I was tired from lack of sleep, and I had just gone to my room to lie down when Naomi knocked on my door to say my dad was on the phone.

“I left an important portfolio on my desk at the house,” my dad told me. “I need you to drive it down here for me.”

I glanced at my watch. It read 10:25. “This afternoon?” I asked hopefully. I was anxious to catch Jason the moment he came home from swimming. My greatest need was to find out how the talk went with Tyler. Jason would be back about noon. If I drove all the way downtown and back, I wouldn’t be home before 12:30 at the earliest.

“I need it for a meeting after lunch,” Dad told me impatiently. “Shit, Brock! I gave you a new car. Get off your ass and drive that portfolio down here!”

On the way out, I yelled to Alexander, “Don’t let Jason leave until I get back!”



When I got to his office, my father made me join him for lunch. That wasn’t as generous as it sounded. For him, it was another opportunity to preach to me as well as to show me off to other people. It wasn’t that he was proud of me. He was just proud of what his genes had done.

It was 1:30 before I got home. Naomi was in the laundry room and told me that Alexander was out on errands. She had no idea where Jason was, but thought he had gone out for the afternoon. Frustrated, I plopped into a chair in the den. If we had cell phones back then, I would have called Jason. Instead, I contemplated heading out to look for him in my car. But what if the talk with Tyler didn’t go well and I ran into Tyler? In the end, I was so damned tired that I decided to nap and dozed off.

I woke later to voices coming down the stairs. Jason and Tyler. Laughing. That was a good sign!

Jumping up from the chair, I went out to the foyer just as the two of them reached the bottom of the stairs. They saw me and Tyler turned instantly red. Looking downright sheepish, he headed for the door. “I have to get home,” he said nervously. “I told my mom that… that I’d take care of some things.” Like that, he was out the door and gone.

I turned to Jason. He was grinning. “What?” I asked him. “What happened? What did he say? Why did he leave so fast?”

“Everything’s fine,” Jason assured me. “We talked and I had a brilliant idea — I brought Tyler back here after practice and got him to sex with me. I knew once he did it with me, too, everything would be cool.”

Tyler saw my face go red and he lost that stupid grin.

I balled up my fist and was going to punch him right where the smiled had been, but I hit the wall instead and drove my fist right through the gypsum board.

“Holy shit, Brock!” Jason exclaimed.

I was so frustrated that I’d made a hole in the wall that I hit it again, and put a second hole, right above the first. Then I turned on Jason. He backed toward the stairs and fell back on his butt on the steps. I bent over him and grabbed his shirt.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Jason demanded in a high, panicky voice. “Tyler’s cool with everything.”

But I wasn’t. Tyler was mine. I didn’t want him falling in love with Jason! I jerked the front of Jason’s shirt to pull him up to face me, but the shirt tore. Angry, frustrated, I went out the front door. Tyler was down the road on his bike. I didn’t want to talk to him anyway so I took off running in the other direction.

There was a park a mile or two from our house. I didn’t stop running until I got there. By then, my temper had started to cool. I realized that everything that happened was pretty much my fault, and that I was most pissed with myself; but I was also really, really pissed with Jason because behind that smile of his, I knew he must have wanted to sex with Tyler himself. Even worse, Tyler must have wanted sex with him.



My temper was nothing compared to my father’s when he saw the two holes in the wall. His girlfriend, Rachael, made it worse. She was the first to see it, and Alexander said she literally howled. She called my father while he was still at the office and acted like I had messed up HER house — My dad’s girlfriends always did that. Each one thought my dad would marry them. Eventually, he did remarry, but not Rachael. The girl he wound up marrying a few years later was one year older than me. That didn’t last long. He finally wound up marrying a third time, and that one seems to have stuck. Lauren is ten years older than me and evidently reminds dad a lot of Jason’s and my mother.

Anyway, I was grounded two weeks, a week for each hole. That was only half of it. I was also to repair the wall — he would arrange for a workman to teach me how and watch me, but I was to do it. Then I was to repaint the entire foyer everywhere there wasn’t wallpaper, upstairs and down, so that the paint over the patch wouldn’t be obvious.

I spoke to no one that night. Jason avoided me. I was tired and went to bed early. Alexander shook his head sadly when I came into the kitchen the next morning.

“Brock, Brock,” he said, planting his hands on his hips. “Next time you wanna bang a wall, you come do it in my room. I won’t tell anyone.” He smiled. “Maybe I let you bang me.”

“Morning, Alexander,” I mumbled, taking a seat at the kitchen island.

Alexander came up beside me and laid a hand on my back. “I make you my special ice coffee and you tell me all that has happened to you.”

He did, and I did. Alexander and I might never be lovers, but he had become my friend.



The painter my father sent arrived mid-morning. Benny was an older guy, maybe in his fifties. He smelled of cigarette smoke and was grizzly, but he seemed friendly enough. He was entirely happy to sit on the stairs and tell me what do to. He only helped when it looked like I might screw things up.

Jason and Tyler showed up after swim team and headed into the kitchen for lunch. I finished cleaning up from patching. Benny had his lunch with him, and ate while I brought in his ladder and the paint Rachael had picked out that morning. As he was opening the first can of paint, Jason and Tyler came from the kitchen.

“You have enough brushes for us to help, too?” Jason asked. Jason didn’t look at me. Tyler looked, smiled wanly, then looked away.

“Sure,” Benny told him. “I’ve got brushes and rollers.”

“You don’t have to,” I told them.

“Yes we do,” Jason told me with a serious look.

“We want to,” Tyler agreed.

I smiled, just slightly, but it was enough that both of them grinned. Even if Jason and Tyler were going to be lovers now instead of me and Tyler, they were about my only friends, well, other than Alexander. I didn’t want to lose them.

Benny directed the three of us, and as the afternoon wore on, things eased between us. We talked about swim team, the Yankees, any number of things, but not about personal stuff — not about Tyler and Jason and me and where we stood with each other. We painted and I looked for an opportunity to talk without anyone else around, but none came up.

By the time my Dad got home toward evening, we were done with the first coat and Benny was showing us how to clean up. Where I had punched holes, little showed.