The Reason, Part Two

During the summer before High School, I wrote B.J. every week. He wrote me back twice, but it did not matter. He had beautiful handwriting but did not have beautiful words (he barely made it out of middle school). My mother allowed us to talk on the phone once a week and his father did the same.

In retrospect, those letters and those calls should have sounded so many alarms. However, my mother claims, even to this day, that she never thought I was gay.

Two days before ninth grade started, we got the news that B.J. was coming back to start high school with us.

I was elated.

Throughout high school, we were inseparable. We were leaders in our church’s youth group and choir. We were active in sports (I played football, he excelled at basketball, we both ran track), in extracurricular (SGA) and one could not be seen without the other.

We even worked at the local grocery store together. We shared everything, including underwear (um… I know… but I am going to be honest here… I am sure that is where my underwear fetish started.)

I loved him deeply, in a way that I cannot describe. It was familial but more- a lot more.

And with love comes pain- sometimes as deep and as mad as the love I felt for him. There was a dark side to our friendship. We fought- a lot. We were jealous of each other. We both vied for attention from other people. He knew how to hurt me (emotionally, mentally) more than anyone else. He knew just the right time and just the right way to make me lose it.

Once, in 11th grade, in front of everyone we hung out with, he asked me if I was gay and stopped me cold in my tracks. He had never done that before and it hurt me to my core. I could not believe it. And the fact that he was saying it in front of our friends made it worse in the eyes of others because we were always together.

The problems we had always blew over, though. No fight could keep us apart because we were more than friends- we were brothers.

But I did not want a brother in him. I wanted a lover.

And that is where it all went wrong.